Elizabeth Stoddard



Elizabeth Drew Stoddard, née Barstow (May 6, 1823 – August 1, 1902), was an American poet and novelist.

Life
She was born Elizabeth Drew Barstow in the small coastal town of Mattapoisett, Massachusetts. She studied at Wheaton Seminary, Norton, Massachusetts. After her marriage in 1852 to poet Richard Henry Stoddard, the couple settled permanently in New York City, where they belonged to New York's vibrant, close-knit literary and artistic circles. She assisted her husband in his literary work, and contributed stories, poems and essays to the periodicals. Many of her own works were originally published between 1859 and 1890 in such magazines as Harper's Monthly, Harper's Bazaar, and The Atlantic Monthly.

Writing
Stoddard is most widely known today as the author of The Morgesons (1862), her first of three novels. Her other two novels are Two Men (1865) and Temple House (1867). Stoddard was also a prolific writer of short stories, children's tales, poems, essays, travel writing, and journalism pieces.

Her work combines the narrative style of the popular nineteenth-century male-centered bildungsroman with the conventions of women's romantic fiction in this revolutionary exploration of the conflict between a woman's instinct, passion, and will, and the social taboos, family allegiances, and traditional New England restraint that inhibit her.

Her most studied work, The Morgesons is set in a small seaport town, and is the dramatic story of Cassandra Morgeson's fight against social and religious norms in a quest for sexual, spiritual, and economic autonomy. An indomitable heroine, Cassandra not only achieves an equal and complete love with her husband and ownership of her family's property, but also masters the skills and accomplishments expected of women. Counterpointed with the stultified lives of her aunt, mother, and sister, Cassandra's success is a striking and radical affirmation of women's power to shape their own destinies. Embodying the convergence of the melodrama and sexual undercurrents of gothic romance and Victorian social realism, The Morgesons marks an important transition in the development of the novel and evoked comparisons during Stoddard's lifetime with such masters as Honoré de Balzac, Leo Tolstoy, George Eliot, the Brontë sisters, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

A major reason for Stoddard's importance to American literature is the historical context of her work: the manner in which her writing embodied and subverted the tension of her present-day culture with the archetypal or received values of the American past. A pioneering precursor of regionalist authors Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Kate Chopin, as well as of American modernism, Stoddard is noteworthy for her writing's almost total lack of sentimentality and for its pervasive use of irony, psychological depth of richly drawn characters, intense atmospheric descriptions of New England, concise language, and innovative use of narrative voice and structure. Her investigation of relations between the sexes, a dominant focus of her fiction, analyzes emotions ranging from love and desire to disdain, aggression, and depression.

Poetry

 * Poems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895.

Novels

 * The Morgesons 1862. Toronto: Penguin Classics, 1997. ISBN 0140436510
 * Two Men 1865. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. ISBN 080329347X
 * Temple House 1867.