ELIZABETH BARRET BROWNING OR DOROTHY PARKER?

I thought of both of these ladies today. 

I stepped off the world this week-end and just read and read and read.
I made coffee every once in a while, I murmured responses to my husband while not listening and put in a load of laundry periodically to assuage my guilt.
(I always resented a phrase used at my work in food retailing--"non-productive time" which was how training and learning and communicating were classified!!)
I would classify my week-end as incredibly productive in measures of
life satisfaction, desire to learn more, pleasure per hour, health restoration
and general good stuff and well-being.

Back to Liz and Dotty!
They had their individual problems, ill health and alcoholism respectively.
But here's what they had that I envied today:

Neither ran a household.
Liz was sickly.  Dotty lived in a hotel.
Both spent their time exactly as they chose.
Reading and writing and to hell with all else.
Both were feminists in work and action albeit in very different ways.
Both hung out with contemporary colleagues on a regular basis focused on common work.
Elizabeth had a very lovely true love and lived with him in Italy til her death.
And Dorothy was a "dame"--brash and funny and bold.

And they wrote well.