Before the Mirror

Description

In her poem, Before the Mirror, she compares herself to the many characters involved in her piece such as the Lady of Shalott who stays in her room by herself and every day she sits in an ancient loom and gazes herself in the big mirror. As well as Penelope, the wife of Ulysses or a knight fully clad with armour or to the lovely flowers of rose and lily.

Elizabeth Drew Barstow Stoddard, was an American poet and author. She was born as Elizabeth Drew Barstow in the small coastal town of Mattapoisett, Massachusetts. She attended the Wheaton Seminary, Norton, Massachusetts. After she got married in 1852 to poet Richard Henry Stoddard, both lived mostly in New York City, where they sojourned to New York’s lively, close literary and creative groups. She helped her husband in his literary career, and wrote stories, poems and essays to the magazines. A number of her own writings first appeared from 1859 to 1890 in such monthly magazines as The Aldine, Harper’s Monthly, Harper’s Bazaar, and The Atlantic Monthly.

Elizabeth is best largely popular at present as the writer of The Morgesons, her first of three stories. Her other two stories are Two Men and Temple House. Elizabeth was also an artistic author of short stories, children’s tales, poems, essays, travel writing, and journalism papers.

Her novel is the sequence form of the celebrated 19th century male-focused bildungsroman with the covenants of women’s love story in this radical discovery of the dispute of a woman’s impulse, desire and spirit, and the social restrictions, family commitments, and traditional New England that limit and hinder her.

Characterizing the combined drama and intimate traces of gothic romance and Victorian social pragmatism, The Morgesons leaves a critical shift in the progression of the story and educed contrasts in her life with masters like Honoré de Balzac, Leo Tolstoy, George Eliot, the Brontë sisters, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
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