Elizabeth Stoddard letters to Ella Farman

Elizabeth Drew Barrett Stoddard (1823-1902) was a much recognized American writer, as well as a regular contributor to the most popular literary periodicals of the day. She was greatly admired in her lifetime by writers including Nathaniel Hawthorne and William Dean Howell. She did not become a financial success but was popular again after her death in the 1960's.She and her husband, poet Richard Henry Stoddard, lived in New York where their home became a salon for some of the most literary figures of the day.

Stoddard wrote three novels, including The Morgensons and many short stories, essays, children's tales, and poems. She was described as being in advance of her time by a generation and was compared with Henrik Ibsen rather than to the romantic period of fiction. Her work questioned the conventions of gender roles and social and religious norms in a quest for sexual, spiritual, and economic autonomy. She explored the conflict between a woman's instinct, passion, and will and the social taboos, family allegiance, and traditional New England restraint that inhibited her. It was as a poet that she gained her highest fame, according to the great English critic, Leslie Stephen, who also highly praised her book, "Temple House."

C. D. Warner, et al., Critical and Biographical Introduction of Elizabeth Stoddard wrote that before she was a dramatist, she was a psychologist, looking with unquestioning eyes into life's problem... She was a realist before the word had been defined."

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Ella Anna Farman Pratt (1837-1907) was the editor of Wide Awake.