● ● ● relations. When Sarah Josepha Hale opened the door for women to enter journalism by her long, commercially successful editorship of Godey’s Lady’s Book, she achieved her success by catering to just this cosseted-and-corseted, blushing-and-fainting feminine ideal.
Many of Mrs. Glover’s journalistic contributions in these years reflect the taste of the period—like the sentimental potboiler she called “Emma Clinton, or a Tale of the Frontiers.”69 Such writings suggest her general uncertainty of direction as well as her desire to earn a measure of independence for herself and George. Like the fashions of the day which she followed in her dress, they relate her to her age without giving any hint of the free, forward movement of which she was capable.
Griswold’s Female Poets of America, first published in 1849, illustrates all too generously what readers wanted.70 Two or three years before in a series of articles on “The Literati” written for Godey’s Lady’s Book, Poe had praised “the starry sisterhood” which was producing verse of this genre, though Hawthorne was later to complain that the whole literary scene was given over “to a damned mob of scribbling women.”71 The queen of all the women poets was Felicia Hemans; and the 1847 edition of her Poetical Works which Mrs. Glover owned is well marked and underlined. In one place the ardent reader wrote the word “glorious” ● ● ●
69 [Mary M. Glover, “Emma Clinton, or a Tale of the Frontiers,” The Covenant, August 1846, pp. 440–454.] There are several autobiographical themes woven into the story, but without significance. It may be dismissed as a product of the ill health of the period and of the author.
↑70 A choice example from this anthology is the following stanza by a now mercifully forgotten female poet:
“I love to love,” said a darling pet,
Whose soul looked out through her eyes of jet,
And she settled down like a fondled dove,
And lisped, “Dear Mama, how I love to love!”
[Marion Ward, “I Love to Love,” in The Female Poets of America: With Portraits, Biographical Notices, and Specimens of Their Writings, ed. Thomas Buchanan Read (Philadelphia: E. H. Butler, 1849), p. 418. Publisher’s note: Peel may have encountered “I Love to Love” in Chad Powers Smith, Yankees and God (New York: Hermitage House, 1954), pp. 378–379, which mistakenly locates the poem in Griswold’s collection; subsequent research shows that the poem appears in Read’s collection of the same name and year.]
↑71 [Edgar A. Poe, “The Literati of New York City,” Godey’s Lady’s Book, May–October 1846; Caroline Ticknor, Hawthorne and His Publisher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), p. 141.]
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