Vanity and Insanity of Genius; with ALS.
With an Autograph Letter Signed
Sanborn, Kate. The Vanity and Insanity of Genius. New York: George J. Coombes, 1886.
8vo.; a.e.g.; brown cloth, stamped in gilt; slight loss to extremities; gilt sharp and fresh.
Boxed together with:
Autograph letter signed, “Kate Sanborn,” 1 W. 81st St. Ap. 29., to “My dear Mrs. Stedman,” one leaf folded to make four pages, three pages covered; creased; small closed tear.
First edition; with an ALS from Sanborn to a Mrs. Stedman, apologizing for not calling on her and expressing the desire to see her next fall, and with a clipping affixed to page 191, and offset onto the opposite page. The unattributed article, “Genius Akin to Madness; remarkable personages who went insane after becoming famous,” cites Rousseau, August Comte, Dante, Newton, Schopenhauer, Guy de Maupassant and Flaubert as having certain mental imbalances, and concludes, “Thus the sons of Tacitus, Bernardin de St. Pierre, Donizetti, Manzino, a daughter of Victor Hugo, the sister of Kant, and the brothers of Zimmermann were all subject to spells of insanity.”
This book is divided into two sections, each consisting of three chapters; the first section is titled, “The Vanity of Genius,” and the second, “Insanity A Shadow of Genius.” In her Preface, Sanborn explains, “Vanity, like space, is illimitable and all-surrounding. I have noted one of its phases, not in an irreverent or sneering spirit, but as a study of human nature. Just as vanity exists in commonplace men and women; but that would make too big a book and lack the charm which Genius throws around its accompanying foibles.” Sanborn continues by giving examples of historical figures from a range of backgrounds – among them; Ovid, Virgil, Homer, Shakespeare, Ruskin, Goethe, Voltaire, Hugo and Chopin – who are undisputed geniuses in their fields but who have also exhibited notorious displays of vanity. About one of them, she quotes,
Buffon, on being asked how many really great men there were, replied, ‘Five – Newton, Bacon, Leibnitz, Montesquieu, and myself.’ Buffon’s vanity was so great, that at work he was always found in full dress and ruffles, and when he walked in his garden, a valet was near at hand with a pair of curling tongs and powder.
With characteristic irony, Sanborn begins the third chapter by exclaiming, “How delightful it must be to feel so important, so above the common herd!” In the second half of the book, Sanborn provides an equally impressive list of “insane” geniuses and their idiosyncrasies, like Byron, Shelley and Swift. About Coleridge, she reveals, “Coleridge himself was a striking instance of great genius shadowed by procrastination, disease and opium. ‘His mind is in a perpetual St. Vitus’s dance. Eternal activity without action.’”
Sanborn (1839-1917) was a noted author, humorist, lecturer and feminist who “mocked the idea that women need to be married to be happy” (Feminist Companion to Literature in English, p. 942). The author of nearly twenty books, Sanborn’s best-known and beloved works are Adopting an Abandoned Farm (1891) and Abandoning an Adopted Farm (1894), which she penned after moving to a farm in Metcalf, Massachusetts. She also published books of her lectures, essays and poems, as well as her autobiography, Memories and Anecdotes (1915). Her writing uses humor and wit in a casual, conversational tone to convey her messages, executed in a style which one of her friends, Edna Dean Proctor, best described as “refreshing.”
Sanborn was the eldest daughter of Edwin David and Mary Ann (Webster) Sanborn; her great-uncle was the American nationalist, lawyer and Federalist Party Leader Daniel Webster, a genealogical association she relished. Her father was a professor of Latin at Dartmouth for over forty years, and also had a four-year teaching stint at Washington University in St. Louis. She grew up in college towns in the presence of intellectuals and while she was not formally schooled, she was we
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