SD1244. Aubrey Thomas de Vere to Sara Coleridge
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 12, 370 (in part).
Curragh Chase
February 12, 1846
My dear Friend,— … I wish you would persuade your friend, Miss Barrett, to write with as much grace and refinement as ever, and not talk about “garrulous God-Innocence,” and such extravagant, over-strained things, which are as objectionable as great unfeminine strides, and abrupt movements. I wish she had less ambition, or rather more and of a nobler sort, that of writing like a woman of genius—as she is—not like a man. Genius may be either masculine or feminine, and each is most perfect in its own way. But she is injured by taking men models, instead of fancying how Sappho and the poetesses of old wrote, or else what a woman’s poetry would be if thoroughly genial—the expression of genius in a feminine mould, and singing its inspirations with that female voice, which is a different instrument from a man’s voice. I meant a great deal by those verses on Female Poetry, but unluckily my skill is chiefly to “hide the matter.” Do you take up the subject, for you are in no danger of falling into the fault which I wage war on therein. …
Text: Wilfrid Ward, Aubrey de Vere, 1904, pp. 101–103.
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