Elizabeth Stuart Phelps paints a tragic portrait of Avis, a would-be artist whose promising career is subsumed by the obligations of marital life. Against the backdrop of the Civil War, Avis battles her conflicting desires: life with the man she loves or the pursuit of artistic greatness. Ultimately, instead of paints and palettes, Avis fills her days with thoughts of doilies and daycare. Following Avis’s struggles to balance her passion with her duties, Phelps proves that artistic ambition is not extinguished by love, but slowly eroded by the constraints of nineteenth-century womanhood.
This is the book for you if…
You have the soul of an artist.
You are in an aura gap relationship.
Your daughter scares you.
You are as enigmatic as the sphinx.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward (1844-1911) was an incorrigible reformer, advocating at various points for dress reform, feminism, social reform, temperance, and an end to the practice of vivisection. In 1874, she penned a rousing call for women to burn their corsets, anticipating the bra-burning feminists of the following century. Her writing career began at 19, when she published a short story about the Civil War titled “A Sacrifice Consumed” in Harper’s Magazine. During her lifetime, she authored 57 volumes of fiction, poetry, and essays. She is perhaps best remembered for the trilogy of Spiritualist novels that she published in the wake of the Civil War—the first of which, The Gates Ajar, had sold 180,000 copies in the US and England by 1900.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps paints a tragic portrait of Avis, a would-be artist whose promising career is subsumed by the obligations of marital life. Against the backdrop of the Civil War, Avis battles her conflicting desires: life with the man she loves or the pursuit of artistic greatness. Ultimately, instead of paints and palettes, Avis fills her days with thoughts of doilies and daycare. Following Avis’s struggles to balance her passion with her duties, Phelps proves that artistic ambition is not extinguished by love, but slowly eroded by the constraints of nineteenth-century womanhood.
This is the book for you if…
You have the soul of an artist.
You are in an aura gap relationship.
Your daughter scares you.
You are as enigmatic as the sphinx.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward (1844-1911) was an incorrigible reformer, advocating at various points for dress reform, feminism, social reform, temperance, and an end to the practice of vivisection. In 1874, she penned a rousing call for women to burn their corsets, anticipating the bra-burning feminists of the following century. Her writing career began at 19, when she published a short story about the Civil War titled “A Sacrifice Consumed” in Harper’s Magazine. During her lifetime, she authored 57 volumes of fiction, poetry, and essays. She is perhaps best remembered for the trilogy of Spiritualist novels that she published in the wake of the Civil War—the first of which, The Gates Ajar, had sold 180,000 copies in the US and England by 1900.
