Elizabeth Stuart Phelps: Selected Tales, Essays, and Poems ed. by Elizabeth Duquette, Cheryl Tevlin (review)

In 1984, when Carol Farley Kessler published a profile of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps in the inaugural volume of Legacy as part of an effort to lift Phelps out of the category of women writers “we still don’t read,” she focused on Phelps’s novels, devoting only a paragraph to her shorter works (3). Thirty years later, this new edition of selected tales, essays, and poems constitutes another important attempt to “return Phelps to the prominence she once enjoyed,” this time by “devoting less attention to the novel” (x, xi). Its appearance testifies to the impact that Phelps’s writing made in one academic setting, since the volume is coedited by Elizabeth Duquette, an associate professor at Gettysburg College, and Cheryl Tevlin, one of her former students. This team has compiled an admirably concise yet comprehensive and judiciously chosen selection of Phelps’s shorter writings. Some of the works, such as “What Shall They Do?” and “The Tenth of January,” are now relatively well known, while others have not been reprinted since Phelps’s lifetime. The result is a collection that will be valuable both to instructors looking for a volume to adopt for course use and to scholars of Phelps and of American literature generally.

Duquette’s introduction to the volume identifies several themes that weave through the works that are reprinted here: the Civil War and its enduring image of internal conflict and division; religion; women’s rights; and form and reform. Attention to the first three has characterized much of the recent scholarship on Phelps, with studies of the cultural work of consolation in The Gates Ajar and its successors leading to studies of Phelps’s depiction of art, artistry, and professionalism in novels such as The Story of Avis and Dr. Zay, which in turn has led to an emphasis on Phelps’s contributions to various reform movements, including temperance, dress, and anti-vivisection. Yet what emerges particularly strongly from Duquette and Tevlin’s volume is the importance of form, and the short form in particular, to all of these thematic foci. By focusing on Phelps’s shorter works, the editors have shown her to be an adept practitioner of this form. It is not clear why they chose to refer to the short fiction as “tales” (Poe’s and Hawthorne’s chosen term) while at the same time including Phelps’s essay “The Short Story,” in which she makes a case for “the American short story” having the promise of being “the best . . . in the world” (216). Whatever the case, this essay should be studied as a direct successor to Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition” as a claim for the prominence of the short story in American literary history.

One of the virtues of the short form is its portability, and Duquette and Tevlin amply illustrate how Phelps herself used this portability to keep her works in circulation through reprinting. Each selection in the volume concludes with a note that gives its complete reprinting history. The notes are brief but well researched, and their placement ensures that the reader will encounter each piece “cold,” with no framing textual apparatus, and then will see how the original piece traveled in later iterations. This reprinting history shows the versatility and professional acumen of Phelps and her subsequent editors, as poems written for religious periodicals like The Independent are then anthologized in books for a wider audience, while works that are published in high-brow periodicals such as The Atlantic are further elevated by being included in prize compendiums. It is also notable that the poems, which are less frequently studied now, were the texts most heavily reprinted during Phelps’s lifetime. At the same time, the notes reveal that the first scholarly reprints of Phelps in the 1970s were framed not in the context of a tradition of women’s writing but rather in the context of...