Pen-Portraits of Literary Women, Complete in Two Volumes

Cone, Helen Gray (Ed.); Gilder, Jeannette L. (Ed.)

Verlag: Cassell & Company, New York, 1887

Hardcover. Join beloved authors like Jane Austen and George Eliot, women's rights activist Mary Wollstonecraft and her science fiction-inventing daughter Mary Shelley, gothic sisters Charlotte and Emily Brontë, and many other literary women here in the demurely-bound, yet bold biographical pages of these "Pen-Portraits." This 1887 set, complete in two volumes, was edited by Hunter College English professor and poet Helen Gray Cone and journalist Jeannette Leonard Gilder, who sought to stray from the path laid out by similar biographical anthologies. As they write in their "Prefatory Note" to Volume I: "We have not confined ourselves to the depicting of personal traits, but have admitted a descriptive background; beyond the figures of Charlotte and Emily Brontë, a glimpse is caught of the wild moors, purple with heather; and the Mediterranean, dark with storm, appears behind the graceful head of Mary Shelley." The two editrixes also drew from letters, contemporary and later accounts, and reviews, both literary and personal, by foes, friends, and family alike, attempting to capture more than biography, but a "pen-portrait," like this one: "Jane Austen was able to write in the midst of a busily-talking roomful of people, her desk sometimes.even upon her knee when there was no other place for it; and under what might seem to many others impossible social conditions or distractions, she wrote 'Sense and Sensibility,' 'Northanger Abbey,' and 'Pride and Prejudice,' all works showing concentration and keep perception.earnest face bent above her page, the keen bright eye suddenly lifted to flash out recognition of something which awas said in her presence, showing how entirely possible it was for her to hear and heed as well." Subjects include: Hannah More, Frances Burney (Mme. d'Arblay), Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Mary Lamb, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Joanna Baillie, Lady Blessington (Marguerite Gardiner), Mary Russell Mitford, Harriet Martineau, Aurore Dudevant (George Sands), Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Margaret Fuller, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Marian Evans Cross (George Eliot). 7 1/2" X 5 1/8". 320pp; 297pp. Bound in deep blue cloth over boards, with spines lettered in bright gilt. Mild wear to binding, with gentle rubbing and bumping to extremities and faint scattered rubbing to cloth. One gathering loosening and proud to Volume II, else bindings are firm, tight, and sound. Brown coated endpapers. Pages are clean and unmarked. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 17096

Bibliografische Details

Titel: Pen-Portraits of Literary Women, Complete in...
Verlag: Cassell & Company, New York
Erscheinungsdatum: 1887
Einband: Hardcover
Zustand: Very good +