Stories

Abstract

Today, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911) is best known for a handful of her novels: The Gates Ajar (1868), The Silent Partner (1871), and The Story of Avis (1877). During her life, however, the short story was a hugely popular genre in which she was fully invested and where she made a good deal of her living. Stories were her earliest and latest publications, and they were work that she both enjoyed and employed to greater ends. From 1864 to her death in 1911, she published almost one hundred and fifty short stories in the leading periodicals of the day. This collection makes available some of those stories, an important and engaging part of her oeuvre that previously has been all but ignored. Phelps saw her narratives as vehicles through which she could reform her society, and her artistic and political vision is both original and transformative.