Part 1 (1/2)

The Wit of Women.

by Kate Sanborn.

INTRODUCTION.

It is refres.h.i.+ng to find an unworked field all ready for harvesting.

While the wit of men, as a subject for admiration and discussion, is now threadbare, the wit of women has been almost utterly ignored and unrecognized.

With the joy and honest pride of a discoverer, I present the results of a summer's gleaning.

And I feel a cheerful and Colonel Sellers-y confidence in the success of the book, for every woman will want to own it, as a matter of pride and interest, and many men will buy it just to see what women think they can do in this line. In fact, I expect a call for a second volume!

KATE SANBORN.

HANOVER, N.H., August, 1885.

My thanks are due to so many publishers, magazine editors, and personal friends for material for this book, that a formal note of acknowledgment seems meagre and unsatisfactory. Proper credit, however, has been given all through the volume, and with special indebtedness to Messrs. Harper & Brothers and Charles Scribner's Sons of New York, and Houghton, Mifflin & Co. of Boston. I add sincere grat.i.tude to all who have so generously contributed whatever was requested.

TO G.W.B.

In Grateful Memory.

_”There was in her soul a sense of delicacy mingled with that rarest of qualities in woman--a sense of humor,” writes Richard Grant White in ”The Fate of Mansfield Humphreys.” I have noticed that when a novelist sets out to portray an uncommonly fine type of heroine, he invariably adds to her other intellectual and moral graces the above-mentioned ”rarest of qualities.” I may be over-sanguine, but I antic.i.p.ate that some sagacious genius will discover that woman as well as man has been endowed with this excellent gift from the G.o.ds, and that the gift pertains to the large, generous, sympathetic nature, quite irrespective of the individual's s.e.x. In any case, having heard so repeatedly that woman has no sense of humor, it would be refres.h.i.+ng to have a contrariety of opinion on that subject._--THE CRITIC.

PROEM.[A]

We are coming to the rescue, Just a hundred strong; With fun and pun and epigram, And laughter, wit, and song;

With badinage and repartee, And humor quaint or bold, And stories that _are_ stories, Not several aeons old;

With parody and nondescript, Burlesque and satire keen, And irony and playful jest, So that it may be seen

That women are not quite so dull: We come--a merry throng; Yes, we're coming to the rescue, And just a hundred strong.

KATE SANBORN.

[Footnote A: _Not_ Poem!]

THE WIT OF WOMEN.

CHAPTER I.

THE MELANCHOLY TONE OF WOMEN'S POETRY--PUNS, GOOD AND BAD--EPIGRAMS AND LACONICS--CYNICISM OF FRENCH WOMEN--SENTENCES CRISP AND SPARKLING.