Man and Wife.
Alice Stone Blackwell’s Copy
[Blackwell, Alice Stone]. Collins, Wilkie. Man and Wife. New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1874.
8vo.; illustrated frontispiece; other illustrations throughout; hinges a bit tender; brown uncoated endpapers; green cloth, stamped in gilt; a heavily rubbed, used copy.
An early reprint of Wilkie Collins’s sensational fictional exposé of the hypocracies of married life, first published in 1870. From the library of Alice Stone Blackwell, with her bold ownership signature on the first blank and signs of heavy use throughout.
All the Blackwells were notable suffragists and social reformers: Henry Blackwell married Lucy Stone; Samuel married Antoinette Brown; Elizabeth was the first woman in America to earn a medical degree, and her younger sister Emily followed in her footsteps, becoming a women’s health advocate. Alice Stone Blackwell (1857-1950), daughter of Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell, was one of the most acclaimed suffrage theorists and authors of her day.
After Lucy Stone’s death in 1893, Alice assumed responsibility for producing and editing The Woman Citizen, the most influential 19th-century feminist journal. A brilliant theorist, writer, scholar, translator and reformer, Blackwell was also responsible for editing and distributing the “Woman’s Column,” an early publicity release targeted to editorial pages nationwide. Blackwell was instrumental in effecting the 1890 reunion of the two wings of the suffrage movement, which had split over the issue of black-versus-woman suffrage; she later prepared the notes for Woodrow Wilson to use in his historic 1916 speech declaring his support for woman suffrage.
Since the 1980s, feminist literary scholars have undertaken a reappraisal of novelist Wilkie Collins, whose most famous works (The Woman In White; The Moonstone; and the present volume) are notable for their sympathetically drawn female characters. Apparently, 19th-century feminists sensed an ally in Collins: it is surely not by mere coincidence that a well-read copy of Man and Wife, Collins’s scathing critique of British and Irish marriage and divorce laws, appears in the library of one of suffrage’s most legendary activists.
(#4611)
Print Inquire
