Abstract
Nineteenth-century women’s verse has long been assigned as poetry of the separate spheres. From its time of writing to its going out of print almost immediately upon the death of its authors, and through its gradual recovery by literary history, it has been largely seen as private and domestic, albeit with varying judgments. In the nineteenth century, regarding the poems as domestic and private made them acceptable, popular, diminutive, and safe. As with many other women’s activities, women’s writing could be consigned to the comforting and appropriate domain of the woman’s sphere.
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Notes
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Paula Benett, Poets in the Public Sphere (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003) offers a range of verse types, but most remains within the rubric of genteel and sentimental in various ways. Her interests are “complaint” literature that focuses on domesticity as constraining, through an equality-feminist political orientation.
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J.G.A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).
Donald Pease, Visionary Compacts (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).
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© 2010 Shira Wolosky
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Wolosky, S. (2010). Public and Private: Double Standards. In: Poetry and Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113008_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113008_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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