One obtuse malediction came from the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who proclaimed that Somerville had never done anything original—a remark that the young sculptor Harriet Hosmer, herself a pathbreaker who opened up the figurative arts for women in the nineteenth century, would tear to shreds. In a letter defending Somerville, she scoffs: To the Carlyle mind, wherein women never played any conspicuous part, perhaps not, but no one, man or woman, ever possessed a clearer insight into complicated problems, or possessed a greater gift of rendering such problems clear to the mind of the
...more
