Tell it Slant: Female Authors and Salons in an Age of Literary Journalism
Our current surveys of nineteenth-century American literature are dominated by the published books of a handful of oft-eulogized men. This mapping of the era is a flattening of a heterogeneous landscape that ignores the contemporary counterbalances to those men and their works within print culture: the literary journal and the literary salon. This archive seeks to resist the dominant narrative by approaching the literary landscape from an oblique angle, one that shifts canonical landmarks from their familiar positions and enables new features to emerge.
By giving voice to the lives of literary journalists Sarah Helen Whitman, Anne Lynch Botta, Frances Sargent Osgood, and Elizabeth Ellet, this archive hopes to tell the record, but
tell it slant.
Re-mapping the Literary Landscape
While our perception of nineteenth-century American literature is largely dominated by a few men, novels, and schools of thought, nineteenth-century print culture was a largely heterogeneous scene that boasted not one but two main spheres of production…
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Literary Salons in the Nineteenth Century
Although its influence has receded in the twenty-first-century, the literary salon was an unparalleled shaper of cultural consciousness across Europe, Britain, and America from its earliest inception at the hands of Madame Rambouillet in the seventeenth century through its most famous incarnation in the parlour of Gertrude Stein in the twentieth century…
Sarah Helen Whitman
Elizabeth Ellet
Frances Sargent Osgood
Anne Lynch Botta
Tell all the truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—
— Emily Dickinson