Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Disparagement of Women in Literature " The time has fully come when the actions of women are not to be judged or commented upon as the actions of a sex. That is to say, the actions of women are human actions, and not necessarily perpetually feminine." Mrs Meynell. The Disparagement of Women in Literature In the year of grace 1850, the year that Wordsworth died and that Tennyson became Laureate in his place and gave " In Memoriam" to the world, there was born a gifted woman whose difficult career affords melancholy proof of how much civilisation has yet to learn in the matter of justice to women. Sonya Kovalevsky, the now world-renowned Russian mathematician, died but the other day, comparatively a young woman, and the tragedy of her brief life, full of obstacle and impediment, of slight and insult, of distress and disappointment, is a standing blot upon the last half of our century, a standing reproach to modern enlightenment and modern culture. But she obtained a professorship at Stockholm University ? Yes; through the chivalry and untiring efforts of one man, Professor Mittag Leffler, Stockholm tardily gave her a Chair. " Stockholm was the only University that would open its doors to me," she herself says, pathetically; only Stockholm out of the scores of Universities in cultivated Europe?in Christian Europe. But Paris awarded her the Prix Bordin ? Yes; towards the close of her storm-tossed life, in the fifth act of the tragedy, the French Academy of Science gave her the prize that was her due, the laurels that she had won. But she was crowned only when she was crushed, when the long struggle against adverse fate had begun to exhaust her vitality and impair her health, when her nervous force, always drained by her excessive emotionalism, was fairly spent ...