Elizabeth Drew Stoddard
Born	Elizabeth Drew Barstow (1823-05-06)May 6, 1823 Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, U.S.
Died	August 1, 1902(1902-08-01) (aged 79) New York City,New York, U.S.
Spouse	Richard Henry Stoddard

Elizabeth Drew Stoddard (néeBarstow; May 6, 1823 – August 1, 1902) was an Americanpoet andnovelist.

Soon after her marriage toRichard Henry Stoddard, the author, she began to publish poems in all the leading magazines, and thereafter, she was a frequent contributor. Her verses were of a high order; she wrote for intellectual readers only. The numerous poems she published in periodicals were not collected in book form untilPoems was published in 1895. In addition to her poetical productions, she published three novels:The Morgesons (New York City, 1862);Two Men (1865), andTemple House (1867). Those books did not find a large sale when first published, but a second edition, published in 1888, found a wider circle of readers. They were pictures ofNew England scenes and characters. In 1874, she publishedLolly Dinks's Doings, a juvenile story.^[1]

Elizabeth Drew Barstow was born May 6, 1823, in the small coastal town ofMattapoisett, Massachusetts. She received a thorough education in various boarding-schools and in her school-days showed her bent towards poetry and literature in general.^[1] She studied atWheaton Seminary,Norton, Massachusetts.

After her marriage in 1852 to poet Richard Henry Stoddard, the couple settled permanently inNew 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 asThe Aldine,Harper's Monthly,Harper's Bazaar, andThe Atlantic Monthly.

Stoddard is most widely known today as the author ofThe Morgesons (1862), her first of three novels. Her other two novels areTwo Men (1865) andTemple 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-centeredbildungsroman 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 asHonoré de Balzac,Leo Tolstoy,George Eliot, theBrontë sisters, andNathaniel Hawthorne.^[2]

One major source of Stoddard's importance to American literature is the historicism 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 predecessor of regionalist authorsMary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman,Sarah Orne Jewett, andKate Chopin, as well as a precursor of American modernism, Stoddard's writing is remarkable for its almost total lack of sentimentality, 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.

• Stoddard, Elizabeth (1997).The Morgesons. Toronto: Penguin Classics.ISBN 0-14-043651-0.
• Stoddard, Elizabeth (1984).The Morgesons and other writings, published and unpublished. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.ISBN 0-8122-7924-7.OCLC 10183456.
• Stoddard, Elizabeth (2008).Two Men. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.ISBN 978-0803293472.

• This article incorporates text from this source, which is in thepublic domain:Willard, Frances Elizabeth; Livermore, Mary Ashton Rice (1893).A Woman of the Century: Fourteen Hundred-seventy Biographical Sketches Accompanied by Portraits of Leading American Women in All Walks of Life (Public domain ed.). Moulton.

• Felker, Christopher D. (1993).Reinventing Cotton Mather in the American Renaissance: Magnalia Christi Americana in Hawthorne, Stowe, and Stoddard. Boston: Northeastern University Press.ISBN 1-55553-187-3.
• Opfermann, Susanne (2003).Stories. Boston: Northeastern University Press.ISBN 1-55553-562-3. Archived from the original on 2006-11-23. Retrieved2006-10-19.
• Putzi, Jennifer (2000).Tattooed still: The Inscription of Female Agency in Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons" Legacy. Vol. 17. University of Nebraska Press. pp. 165–173.
• Mahoney, Lynn (2004). Cain, Willam (ed.).Elizabeth Stoddard and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Culture. Studies in Major Literary Authors. New York City, NY: Routledge.ISBN 9781135883416.
• Moss, Elizabeth (1992).Domestic Novelists in the Old South. baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.ISBN 0-8071-2796-5. Archived fromthe original on 2006-09-10. Retrieved2006-10-19.
• Smith, Robert McClure; Weinauer, Ellen, eds. (2003).American Culture, Canons, and the Case of Elizabeth Stoddard. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama.
• Stockton, Elizabeth (2006). "'A Crusade against Duty': Property, Self-Possession, and the Law in the Novels of Elizabeth Stoddard".The New England Quarterly.79 (3):413–438.

• Media related toElizabeth Drew Stoddard at Wikimedia Commons
• Quotations related toElizabeth Drew Stoddard at Wikiquote
• Works by or aboutElizabeth Drew Stoddard atWikisource
• Works by Elizabeth Stoddard atProject Gutenberg
• Works by or about Elizabeth Drew Stoddard at theInternet Archive
• Works by Elizabeth Drew Stoddard atLibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• "Chapter 3: Early Nineteenth Century - Elizabeth Stoddard".PAL: Perspectives in American Literature- A Research and Reference Guide. Aug 20, 2002. Archived fromthe original on Oct 3, 2002.

• 1823 births
• 1902 deaths
• People from Mattapoisett, Massachusetts
• 19th-century American novelists
• American women novelists
• American women poets
• 19th-century American poets
• 19th-century American women writers
• Novelists from Massachusetts
• Poets from Massachusetts
• American women essayists
• 19th-century American essayists
• 19th-century American women journalists
• Journalists from Massachusetts
• American children's writers
• American women children's writers

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