Quote by Megan Marshall

“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

“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

“A man’s idea of God corresponds to his ideal of himself. The nobler he is, the more exalted his God.”

— Megan Marshall

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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