Elizabeth Drew Barstow Stoddard

Background

Elizabeth was born on May 6, 1823 in Mattapoisett, Massachussets, United States, the second of nine children of Wilson and Betsey (Drew) Barstow. Her paternal ancestors came from Yorkshire, England, the first-known, William Barstow, having settled in Hanover, Massachussets, in 1649. He and his male descendants were shipbuilders, always prominent in their several localities, and frequently wealthy.

Education

Elizabeth attended school in Mattapoisett and was later sent to several educational institutions in New England, among them the Wheaton Female Seminary at Norton, Massachussets. From the first she showed a disinclination for prescribed study, although she read avidly.

Career

After her marriage, fostering a natural inclination and encouraged by her husband, Elizabeth began to write. Short stories, poems, and sketches from her pen began to appear infrequently in the Atlantic Monthly, the Knickerbocker, Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Appleton's Journal, and other publications. From 1854 to 1855, she was a semi-monthly columnist of cultural-political commentary at Daily Alta California.

In 1862 her first novel, The Morgesons, appeared. This was followed by Two Men (1865), Temple House (1867), both fiction; Lolly Dinks's Doings (1874), a book for children; and her collected Poems (1895). With her husband, she edited several books of minor importance. As a writer, Mrs. Stoddard was in advance of her time.

Her novels, praised for their verisimilitude by Hawthorne and by Leslie Stephen, were realistic, even photographic, in detail in a day when the literature in vogue was either romantic or didactic and consciously ethical. The scene of each is laid in New England, and the characters are mainly the grim, determined folk of the author's girlhood. Although each of the works was twice reprinted, they were never really popular.

Achievements

• Elizabeth Drew Stoddard was a nineteenth-century American novelist, poet, short story writer, and journalist best known for her novel The Morgesons. An outspoken and irreverent writer, she penned seventy-five articles for a bi-weekly column in the San Francisco Daily Alta California. She authored only five books, consisting of three novels, a book of children’s stories and a volume of poetry. She also published more than eighty essays and short fiction pieces, as well as poetry, in several periodicals. Much of her correspondence and manuscripts are available at such institutions as the American Antiquarian Society, the Boston Public Library, Columbia University’s Rare Books & Manuscript Library, the Houghton Library at Harvard University, the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library. Though she received only modest critical recognition in her time, scholars have since seen her as a forerunner of experimental realism.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Morgesons

    (The Morgesons, written in the first person, is a semiauto...)

    1862
  • Lolly Dinks's doings

    (Lolly Dinks's Doings, a book of stories for children, is ...)

    1874
  • Lemorne Versus Huell 2004
  • Temple House 1867
  • Poems 1895

Religion

Dissatisfied with the strong, evangelical Protestant leaning of the Wheaton Female Seminary', which she twice attended, Elizabeth criticized organized religion in various newspaper columns, and her fictional characters were often decidedly secular.

Views

Elizabeth's poetry, less popular with all and less important to her than her fiction, is a direct personal revelation. Uneven, careless in structure, it nevertheless burns with the intensity characteristic of the writer, and its morbidity of thought unfailingly reveals the frustration of her hopes and desires.

Her column in San Francisco Daily Alta California included book reviews of works by the renowned Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, to name a few. She also recounted social and cultural events and random gossip. She frequently examined such topical issues as temperance, women writers, and women’s rights. Over four years, her column became the most popular regular article in the newspaper.

Personality

A frail, nervous, highly imaginative woman, Elizabeth was something of an angular individualist. Her tongue was sharp, and she frequently made enemies by its injudicious use. Nevertheless, those of her many acquaintances who understood her life knew her as a woman of kindliness and intelligence, with some literary talent, an apt critical judgment, and keen, tart, conversational power.

Elizabeth loved to read eighteenth-century English novels and periodical fiction.

Connections

In 1851, Elizabeth married Richard Henry Stoddard. They had three children.

Father:

Wilson Barstow

Mother:

Betsey (Drew) Barstow

Spouse:

Richard Henry Stoddard

2 July 1825 - 12 May 1903

Richard was a famous poet.

Son:

Lorimer Stoddard

11 December 1863 - 31 August 1901

Friend:

Thomas Robbins

References

• Contemporary Authors New Revision Series In response to the escalating need for up-to-date information on writers, Contemporary Authors New Revision Series (Volume 198) brings researchers the most recent data on the world's most popular authors.
  2010
• The Feminist Companion to Literature in English Describes the lives and work of female literary figures.
  1990
• The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States provides a comprehensive, authoritative, and highly informative survey of these writers and their work as it illuminates the issues that fired their imaginations.
  1995
• Dictionary of Literary Biography The Yearbook provides signed essays summarizing the year in poetry, fiction, biography, drama and childrens books we well as scholarly articles, interviews, biographies and critical studies covering events, organizations, works, writers and the business of literature.
  1997