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010*. E. М. Frolova-Bagreeva (née Speranskaja) / Е. М. Фролова-Багреева (рожд. Сперанская)

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Elizaveta Michajlovna Frolova-Bagreeva (1799-1857), born Speranskaja, is next. Since her birthdate was missing from  the NEWW list  that provides most of our names, she was assigned "1700" as a default, putting her smack in the middle of the eighteenth century, though her rightful place is much later – in the middle of the nineteenth century. So we find her name out of chronological order (hence the "*" by her number), another look ahead at women's writing a few generations after the empress Elizaveta Petrovna (which is where we left off with our historical progression). Frolova-Bagreeva is a very interesting case, and one not selected for inclusion in the 1994 Dictionary of Russian Women Writers. Indeed, she illustrates several ways in which women writers can slip through the cracks of the canon and all but disappear. Although her life was not as dramatic as Ksenija Borisovna Godunova's ( see our last post ), it had some very sharp ups and dow