For the fans of mad prescriptivism

[George Thompson]

A She Genius.  [a writer for the North American Review writes of "the Genius
of Poetry", but makes the personification feminine: "such absurdity"]
N-Y Commercial Advertiser, October 8, 1831, p. 2, col. 2

Surely this can't be the first time this absurdity had been committed?
 Glancing over the quotations under "genius" in th OED doesn't seem to give
a clue.

This editor, along with all of the others of his time, was a pretty staunch
male supremacist, distinguishing between "the sterner sex" and "the gentler
sex", and so forth.  But "genius" was grammatically masculine, in Latin; can
this be his complaint?

The editor was William Leete Stone, whom you have met before, as the first
coiner of the joke "New York will be a darned fine city, if they ever get it
finished" (in 1828, as I recall).

GAT

--
George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ.
Pr., 1998, but nothing much since then.

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