“It was Waldo Emerson who would stay, bound to his “imperfect” marriage “because he dont believe in any thing better,” and unable to forget Margaret, who, he would realize with increasing gratitude in later years, with her “radiant genius &… — 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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“am caught in such a net of ties here.” Again she almost revealed her secret: “if ever you know of my life here, I… — Megan Marshall Copy Share
“Woman, self-centred, would never be absorbed by any relation.” The “excessive devotion” that results when women live “so entirely for men,” when a woman… — Megan Marshall Copy Share
“from a very early age . . . that I was not born to the common womanly lot. I knew I should never find a being… — Megan Marshall Copy Share
