Petrino, Elizabeth (Anne) 1962-

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PETRINO, Elizabeth (Anne) 1962-

PERSONAL: Born July 18, 1962. Education: State University of New York at Buffalo, B.A. (summa cum laude); Cornell University, M.A., Ph.D., 1991.

ADDRESSES: Offıce—Dept. of English, DMH 109, Fairfield University, 1073 North Benson Rd., Fairfield, CT 06824. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Louisiana Tech University, Ruston, assistant professor of English; Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC, assistant professor of English; Fairfield University, Fairfield, CT, assistant professor of English.

MEMBER: Phi Beta Kappa.

WRITINGS:

Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: Women's Verses in America, 1820-1885, University Press of New England (Hanover, NH), 1998.

Contributor to The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, England), 2001.

SIDELIGHTS: With her debut work Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: Women's Verses in America, 1820-1885, Elizabeth Petrino examines the state of women's writing in nineteenth-century America. Based on over ten years of research, Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries builds on topics originally presented in Petrino's doctoral dissertation, such as how Dickinson's works compare to those of her contemporaries, including Louisa May Alcott, Helen Hunt Jackson, Lydia Sigourney, and Frances Osgood. Petrino also addresses such issues as why Dickinson refrained from publishing her poems, and why many of her writings center on death. Citing examples such as nineteenth-century reviews by male editors of other women's poems, Petrino describes Dickinson's motive for not publishing her poems as an unwillingness to let her writings be limited by convention.

Kim Woodbridge, writing for Library Journal, commented that "Petrino discusses how Dickinson, rather than being separate from her contemporaries, actually used the same poetic themes deemed acceptable to women writers but differed in creating 'a new powerful means of expression within the prescribed limits.'" Marianne Noble, a reviewer for Legacy stated that the book "reveals Dickinson as a poet who both observed conventional boundaries of Victorian female expression and transformed them to create her own startling, brilliant poetic voice."