Delia Bacon, History's Odd Woman Out* by Nina Baym  FEMINIST
literary scholars in search of neglected antebellum women
writers have made it impossible to consider fiction without
Harriet Beecher Stowe, abolitionism without Lydia Maria Child,
transcendentalism without Margaret Fuller. Stowe, Child, and
Fuller were powerful intellectual forces in their own time, and
their literary achievements are central to our understanding of
antebellum culture now. Delia Bacon's is a different story. Her
repeated attempts to forge a literary career were just as
repeatedly rebuffed during her lifetime, and her magnum opus,
The Philosophy of Shakespeare's Plays Unfolded, was indeed, as
Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of it, a "ponderous octavo volume,
which fell with a dead thump at the feet of the public and has
never been picked up"--unreadable then, and unreadable now. [1]
Yet despite his reservations, Hawthorne subvented publication of
the book, and Bacon somehow managed to attract New England
luminaries like Ralph Waldo Emers