etesses are Walker, Nightingale’s Burden;Ostriker, Stealing the Language;Walker,
American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century;Feldman, British Women Poets of
the Romantic Era;Ashfield, Romantic Women Poets 1770–1838;Linkin and
Behrendt, Romanticism and Women Poets.
It should be remembered that socioeconomic conditions for women differed
in Russia, the United States, and Britain. So, for example, in the United States a
middle-class woman could earn “significant amounts of money by publishing
poetry” in magazines for a new “semi-educated class” of women (Walker,Amer-
ican Women Poets,xxii; Walker, Nightingale’s Burden, 36 ). Walker estimates that
in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century five hundred women worked
as writers, editors, and contributors to such journals, a circumstance that af-
fected the quantity and quality of poetry written (Nightingale’s Burden, 74 ). Such
was not the case in Russia.
53 .Susan Wolfson, “Felicia Hemans and the Revolving Doors of Reception,”
in Romanticism and Women Poets, 214.
54 .E. Rostopchina, “Iz portfel’ia starogo zhurnalista,” 257–58. Domestic ide-
ology portrayed women as both morally superior to men and obliged to be sub-
missive to them (“the angel in the house”). Some women in the United States
and elsewhere attempted to use this contradiction to empower women. See my
“Mid-nineteenth-Century Domestic Ideology in Russia,” 88.
55 .Ocherki bol’shogo sveta( 1839 ); Stikhotvoreniia( 1841 ); Neliudimka( 1850 );
Schastlivaia zhenshchina( 1852 ); U pristani( 1857 ); Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii
(1856–57).
56 .Belinskii obliquely refers to “Iskushenie” in “Sochineniia Zeneidy R-voi”
when he writes, “All [Rostopchina’s] thoughts and feelings seem to whirl to
the music of Strauss,” an allusion to the lines “With their invincible playfulness /
The waltzes of Laner and Strauss captivate the beautiful women” (Polnoe so-
branie sochinenii, 7 : 656 ). See Bykov, “Russkie zhenshchiny-pisatel’nitsy,” 242 ;
Ernst, “Karolina Pavlova i gr. Evdokiia Rastopchina,” 28 ; Chernyshevskii,
“Stikhotvoreniia grafini Rostopchinoi,” 2 ; Nekrasova, “Grafinia E. P. Ros-
topchina,” 46 ; Tsebrikova, “Russkiia zhenshchiny pisatel’nitsy,” 437. Afanas’ev
suggests that Rostopchina was not serious when she wrote the poem (“‘Da,
zhenskaia dusha,’” 11 ).
More than 130 years later it was still considered shocking to question
women’s primary vocation as mother. See Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and
the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise(New York: Harper & Row,
1976 ).
57 .E.g., Afanas’ev, “‘Da, zhenskaia dusha,” 9.
58 .Osgood quoted in Walker, American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Cen-
tury, 133. Similarly, the U.S. editor and poet Sarah Hale wrote, “The path of po-
etry, like every other path in life, is to the tread of woman exceedingly circum-
scribed. She may not revel in the luxuriance of fancies, images and thoughts, or
indulge in the license of choosing themes at will, like the lords of creation”
(quoted in Ostriker, Stealing the Language, 30 ).
59 .Among the few scholars to credit Rostopchina with irony are Stephanie
Sandler (“Law, the Body, and the Book,” 36 ) and Catriona Kelly (History of Rus-
sian Women’s Writing, 46 ).
Notes to Pages 105–110 261