Art and Handcraft in the Woman's Building
of the World's Columbian Exposition

WOMAN IN LITERATURE. IN this great review of ours, each company in turn steps to the front, shows its colors, salutes, and passes on to make room for the next. Painters, sculptors, needlewomen, have gone by, and now the woman, of letters must raise her banner (sable, a pen rampant by two ink-pots couchant, on a white ground; motto, “ Legion! ”), must come forward, and give an account of herself. She is notoriously modest, yet she thinks she has a pretty good account to render, and points with gentle pride to her well-ordered ranks; while, to convince the world of her advance, she refers the public to the literary women of half a century ago, and challenges a comparison. Though she boasts of no higher attainment than her sisters of other professions, yet she may say that she comes of an older family; for woman began, to write before she thought of taking prominence in other arts. Was not Anne Bradstreet, wife of Simon the Governor, the first American poet? She died in 1672. She was called the Tenth Muse, and the grim Puritans wept over her poems. One reads them to-day with respect, but feels no keen desire for her Parnassus. Next in order, perhaps, comes Miss Hannah. Adams, a gentle and lovely soul, who lived into our own century, and, dying, was the first person buried in Mount Auburn. The family of Sedgwick gives us two writers in the same generation, though one of them held the name by marriage only, having been a Livingston, by birth. This latter was Susan, author of several novels and tales, of which one, “ Walter Thornby,” was written when slie was over seventy years of age. Better known than this per- severing lady was her sister-in-law, Miss Catherine Sedgwick, whose moral tales attained a wide popularity. She might be called the American Miss Edgeworth, and some of her titles, “ The Poor Rich Man and the Rich Poor Man,” “ Means and Ends,” etc., remind us forcibly of that sprightly moralist. Next we must mention Mrs. Sigourney, a writer of wide repute, though little read to-day. “ Pocahontas and Other Poems,” “ Lays of the Heart,” “ Tales in Prose and Verse,” the very titles breathe of bygone days and thoughts; yet Mrs. Sigourney was a noble and 7 (97)