ABSTRACT
Sara Coleridge’s preoccupation with the social significance of ‘personal beauty’ culminated in 1826 in her reply to Caroline Bowles’s essay, ‘Beauty’, reprinted that year in her Solitary Hours miscellany. At first glance, the quotation from Francis Bacon’s ‘Of Beauty’ essay seems to be a rhetorical device that lends a certain credibility and scholarly gravitas to Coleridge’s argument. Coleridge stops short of explicitly feminist protest, sidestepping the issue of exactly why it is that men are only occasionally ‘voluntary slaves to their glass & toilet’, in favour of erasing gender distinctions altogether. Newly alert to the existence of an unbridgeable gender divide, wary of the precariousness of her position as a woman translator, Coleridge struggled uncomfortably with choosing new sources to translate. The men in Coleridge’s essay differ from the women only in that they possess a more sober attitude towards their own ‘personal attractions’.
