Theodore Stanton – författare

Regarded as the foremost animal painter of her time and the most famous female artist of the nineteenth century, Rosa Bonheur (1822-99) is best known for her works Ploughing in the Nivernais and The Horse Fair. She showed an early talent for drawing people and animals, and quickly determined that art would be her career, visiting the abattoirs of Paris and performing dissections in order to better understand animal anatomy. Through her independent spirit, successful career and unconventional lifestyle she made men and other women aware of what could be achieved. Of the various sources of biographical detail about Bonheur, this 1910 publication is among the most authoritative. Incorporating translated letters between the artist and her friends and family members, it provides invaluable first-hand evidence of her approach to painting and her views on the art world more widely. The work is illustrated throughout with many fine engravings.

The American journalist Theodore Stanton (1851-1925), son of the leading feminist and suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, published this remarkable collection of essays in 1884. His intention had been to get from each European country 'the collaboration of one or more women, who ... had participated, either actively or in spirit, in some phase of the women's movement'. In seventeen chapters, all but two written by women, the progress of 'the woman question' - the debate on the rights of women to financial independence, higher education and the franchise - across Europe (and in the Ottoman empire) is described, largely for an American and British readership. The work, introduced by the veteran feminist Frances Power Cobbe, has among the contributors (each given a short biography) many famous names in the struggle for women's rights at the end of the nineteenth century, including (from Britain) Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Jessie Boucherett and Maria Grey.

This book has been made a Memorial Volume out of compliment to American literature and is dedicated, with his permission, to President Roosevelt. This book presents an interesting evidence of the growth of the popularity of American literature in Europe and strives to show the high appreciation for American authors.

The "Collection of British Authors," or, as it is more popularly known on the European Continent, the "Tauchnitz Edition," was instituted in 1841, at Leipsic, by one of the most distinguished of German publishers, the late Baron Bernhard Tauchnitz, whose son is now at the head of the house. The father records that he was "incited to the undertaking by the high opinion and enthusiastic fondness which I have ever entertained for English literature: a literature springing from the selfsame root as the literature of Germany, and cultivated in the beginning by the same Saxon race.... As a German-Saxon it gave me particular pleasure to promote the literary interest of my Anglo-Saxon cousins, by rendering English literature as universally known as possible beyond the limits of the British Empire." In another place, Baron Tauchnitz describes "the mission" of his Collection to be the "spreading and strengthening the love for English literature outside of England and her Colonies."Baron Tauchnitz early felt that the general title of the series, "Collection of British Authors," was a misnomer,vi which might even give offence to an important branch of the English-speaking race; for, though Bulwer and Dickens led off in the Collection, "Pelham" being the first volume issued and "The Pickwick Papers" the second, the fourth volume, added at the beginning of the second year of publication, in 1842, was Fenimore Cooper''s "The Spy," followed in the same year by a second volume of the same author. Furthermore, the year 1843 opened with Washington Irving''s "Sketch Book," immediately followed by a third novel by Cooper; and, though it was not till 1850 that another American work gained admittance into this charmed circle, not fewer than three of Irving''s books succeeded one another in the single twelvemonth. In 1852, Hawthorne was welcomed with "The Scarlet Letter" and Mrs.