Elizabeth Stuart Phelps – författare

The well-educated daughter of a minister, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911) was introduced to writing at a young age, as both her mother and father were published writers. In 1868 she published her first major novel, The Gates Ajar. An international success, the novel sold more than six hundred thousand copies, making it one of the best-selling American works of the nineteenth century. Through the next four decades Phelps published hundreds of essays, tales, and poems, which appeared in every major American periodical, while also writing novels, including Beyond the Gates (1883) and The Gates Between (1887).Phelps's legacy as an important American writer, however, has been hurt by the seeming contradictions between her life and work. For example, she was an ardent advocate for women's rights both inside and outside marriage, but her stories seem to glorify the sort of extreme self-sacrifice associated with the most conservative domestic ideology. In this collection, the editors seek to restore Phelps's reputation by bringing together a diverse collection from the entire body of her lifetime of work. From arguments for suffrage to harrowing tales of Reconstruction, these essays, along with short fiction and poetry, provide a new perspective on a major American writer from the later nineteenth century.

Trixy is a 1904 novel by the best-selling but largely forgotten American author and women's rights activist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844-1911). The book decries the then-common practice of vivisection, or scientic experiments on live animals.Though not well known today, Phelps's 1868 spiritualist novel, The Gates Ajar, which offered a comforting view of the afterlife to readers traumatized by the Civil War, was the century's second best-selling American novel, surpassed only by Uncle Tom's Cabin. Recently scholars and readers have begun to reexamine Phelps's significance. In Trixy, contemporary readers can trace the roots of the early animal rights movement in Phelps' influential campaign to introduce legislation to regulate or end vivisection. Phelps not only presents a narrative polemic against the cruelty of vivisection but argues that training young doctors in vivisection makes them bad physicians.Emily E. VanDette's introduction illuminates that Phelps' protest writing, which included fiction, pamphlets, essays, and speeches, was well ahead of its time. As contemporary authors like Peter Singer, Jonathan Safran Foer, Donna Haraway, Gary Francione, and Carol J. Adams have extended her vision, they have also created new audiences for her work.

Avis is a nineteenth-century painter who strives to keep herself free of marriage and entanglements. As a child, Avis decides that given a woman's options of marriage or being a "lady," "I think I'd rather keep dogs." She is caught all the same, by a "modern man" and through her life, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps describes the struggle of a woman to be wife, mother, and artist. Although Avis declares and her fiance agrees that she must not "resign my profession as an artist," the reality greets her with their first house: "It was not quite clear where the studio was to be, unless in the attic." But the house is near the college, where her husband teaches, and that "in the view of the New England winters, and the delicate health of the young professor, was decisive." She returns from an hour in her studio to clogged drains and unexpected company, descending "from the sphinx to the drainpipe in one fell swoop." Truly, she does hate housekeeping, and while she loves her baby, "sometimes, sitting burdened with the child upon her arms, she looked out and off upon the summer sky with a strangling desolation like that of a forgotten diver, who sees the clouds flit, from the bottom of the sea." And so it goes. How modern is the "modern man" and how much do women's roles ever change? This book, written more than one hundred years ago, will still seem very real to many women today. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Erica Bauermeister