But while her articles on public questions, signed always with an asterisk (*), were those most read in New York, it was her literary criticism that traveled farthest and brought forth most praise or blame. Her first paper in the "Tribune" was a review of Emerson's "Essays," which appeared December 7, 1844.[1] Here she was, in a manner, on her own ground; but she soon had to plunge, so far as literature was concerned, into a sea of troubles. She entered on her work at a time when the whole standard of literary criticism, not only in America but in England, needed mending. The tomahawk theory still prevailed among editors and even among authors; men revenged literary slights by personal abuse; the desire to "make an example" of a person or to "get even with him" had not then vanished from literature, as it has not yet disappeared from politics. Poe's miscellaneous writings were full of this sort of thing; Lowell's "Fable for Critics" was not at all free from it. At such a time it was no easy thing for a woman to pass from a comparatively secluded life in Boston and her circle of personal friends in the "Dial," to what then seemed the metropolitan life of New York and the hand-to-mouth existence of a daily newspaper.
To the bad tendencies of the time her work furnished an excellent antidote. From some experiences of the daily journal she recoiled at first and perhaps always; the break-neck speed, the
- ↑ Parton's Greeley, p. 255.
