Paraic Finnerty > Quotes

“For Dickinson as part of a middle-class community anxious about female creativity, self-assertion, self-expression, and egoism, Shakespeare and Stratford may have been emblems appropriate to her own task as a writer: to achieve literary renown but also authorial disappearance.”
― Paraic Finnerty, Emily Dickinson's Shakespeare

“Bennett advises his daughter not to develop a passion for poetry because it is ‘dangerous to a woman’: like novels, poetry heightens a woman’s ‘natural sensibility to an extravagant degree’ and ‘inspires a ‘romantic turn of the mind,’ that is ‘utterly inconsistent with the solid duties and priorities of life.”
― Paraic Finnerty, Emily Dickinson's Shakespeare