“Six years earlier, as she commenced her Conversation classes, Margaret had written in her journal about the discomfort that her verbal superiority sometimes brought her, when “a woman of tact & brilliancy like me, has an undue advantage in conversation… — Megan Marshall Copy Share Image
“Could she have known that it was her own image that, Waldo wrote, “rose before me at times into heroical & godlike regions, and I could remember no superior women”? Indeed, to Waldo, who had once unkindly disrupted her Conversations… — Megan Marshall Copy Share Image
“At thirty-six, Margaret believed her “mind and character” were already “too much formed” through “a liberal communion with the woful struggling crowd of fellow… — Megan Marshall Copy Share Image
“The expansion of their dyad to include the “young people” gave both Margaret and Waldo hope of more: “of being often & often shined… — Megan Marshall Copy Share Image
“A man’s idea of God corresponds to his ideal of himself. The nobler he is, the more exalted his God.” — Megan Marshall Copy Share Image
“Yet “Platonic affection” can only seem “sublimated and idealized to the more experienced.” It was a painful message for Margaret, an unmarried woman with… — Megan Marshall Copy Share Image
“And there was a fourth, “highest grade” of marriage, which included the best features of the others, “home sympathies” and “intellectual communion,” but added… — Megan Marshall Copy Share Image
“It was in Horace Greeley that Margaret recognized a “go-ahead, fearless adroitness” that was simply “American.” Waldo’s deprecatory assessment that Greeley was “no scholar,”… — Megan Marshall Copy Share Image
“It was not just her unusual intellect and outsized personality that made Margaret seem to Waldo more manly than feminine, but also her anomalous… — Megan Marshall Copy Share Image
“She had made the observation several years before to a startled Waldo Emerson that “women are Slaves.” Married women in particular—and that meant most… — Megan Marshall Copy Share Image
“Why do women love bad men? Margaret had asked the question herself, and answered it, in Woman in the Nineteenth Century. The belief that… — Megan Marshall Copy Share Image
“long as man “has the physical power, as well as the conventional” to treat a woman “like a play-thing or a slave,” she’d written… — Megan Marshall Copy Share Image
“But she worried about how the older students, who were required to leave the school at age twelve, would find work. Many of these… — Megan Marshall Copy Share Image
“Elizabeth Bishop wrote love poems, and poems about lovemaking, and one of the best poems ever written in English about the loss of love,… — Megan Marshall Copy Share Image