and silence have fought my battle for me -brought him to terms -that is, to publish only what I stipulate for, instead of the thumping volume he wanted to make’ (Dowden, p. 95). As usual, she expected Blackwood to furnish the volume with a title. On this occasion, how­ ever, it was Southey who came up with ‘Solitary Hours’. She had written to him:

doi:10.4324/9780429459375-52

Chapter

and silence have fought my battle for me -brought him to terms -that is, to publish only what I stipulate for, instead of the thumping volume he wanted to make’ (Dowden, p. 95). As usual, she expected Blackwood to furnish the volume with a title. On this occasion, how ever, it was Southey who came up with ‘Solitary Hours’. She had written to him:

Chapter

ABSTRACT

Apart from the key issue of payment, another important pointer to a writer’s degree of professionalism must be the amount of attention paid to matters of presentation, including^printing and typeface. Given her peculiar disdain for titles, and her constant self-deprecating reference to her own magazine contributions as ‘trifles, scraps, idle verses, bundles of fragments’, one might have expected that she would leave all matters of material production to her publisher’s editor: far from it. Except on the occasions when David Moir’s services were offered her,10 she in sisted on correcting proofs herself with great minuteness, becoming exceedingly cross if her instructions were neglected. One reason why details of visual presentation engaged her so strongly was, of course, that she was artist as well as writer.