Reviews of a Part of Prescott's History of Fedinand and Isabella, and of Campbell's Lectures on Poetry.
“The Distinctive Nobleness Of Soul
Is Not Confined To The Male Sex...”
Sanders, Elizabeth. Reviews of a Part of Prescott’s ‘History of Ferdinand and Isabella,’ and of Campbell’s ‘Lectures on Poetry.’ Boston: J.H. Francis, 1841.
8vo., brown cloth, stamped in blind and gilt; lightly used.
First edition of this late volume, published anonymously; Transcendentalist Elizabeth Sanders was credited with the work posthumously. In these two “reviews,” Sanders explores her controversial racial and gender theories. One example will suffice to convey the tone of her discourse: “The distinctive nobleness of soul is not confined to the male sex; women have appeared among our Aborigines of nature’s sterling coinage. Pocahontas was but the prototype of others, who, by their disinterested generosity and romantic heroism, veiled their own lives to save even their foes...” (p. 107).
Social critic and pamphleteer Elizabeth Sanders, née Elizabeth Elkins, was born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1762; little is known about her early years, but DAB suggests that “presumably she attended one of the dame schools of the day.” In 1782 Elkins married merchant Thomas Sanders and, like many successful Salem families of the age, the couple lived comfortably off of Chestnutt Street. Though Sanders had six children, she was far from typical in every other way. An omnivorous reader, she maintained strong political passions and was especially concerned with the plight of the American Indian. Particularly incensed by the U.S. government’s treatment of Indians in the South during the Seminole Wars, Sanders became convinced that the “American aborigines” were a people of superior moral stock who had been treated without justice or humanity. In 1828 she published Conversations, Principally on the Aborigines of North America, and followed it the next year with The First Settlers of New England; both works were published anonymously. Sanders died in Salem in 1851.
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