The Story Of Avis by Elizabeth Phelps

The Story Of Avis by Elizabeth Phelps

One of the most prolific and popular American writers of her time, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps is, nearly a century later, once more coming to be considered a major author. The Story of Avis, her most ambitious and successful novel, has long been out of print and will prove a revelation to modern readers. Avis is the story of a larger-than-life heroine, a promising artist, who against her better judgment is persuaded by her lover, Philip Ostrander--a new man--to marry. The failure of their modern marriage, and in due course of Avis's career, is inevitable. Phelps depicts the turmoil of her characters' inner lives with great sensitivity and with a skill that is striking. A feminist who clearly saw the constraints of traditional gender roles upon women and men, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps was ahead of her own time in post-Civil War America. She remains highly readable today. The Story of Avis (1877) will shock any reader who still thinks nineteenth-century American women's fiction is sentimental and pious. This novel is angry, not sentimental; iconoclastic, not pious; it concerns a talented and dedicated painter whose marriage destroys her genius.--Choice This ornately articulate novel is playful; both kind and hopeful in its vision of the female conundrum. . . . I had intended to speed read it]. I ready every word.--Joyce Bright, Belles Lettres

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (August 31, 1844-January 28, 1911) was an early feminist American author and intellectual who challenged traditional Christian beliefs of the afterlife, challenged women's traditional roles in marriage and family, and advocated clothing reform for women. Following the publication of her bestselling novel The Gates Ajar, Phelps became an international literary celebrity, publishing hundreds of essays, stories, and poems, placing work in every major American periodical and writing novels for both adults and children. She lectured on George Eliot at Boston University, the first woman to do so, and contributed to William Dean Howells's collaborative novel, The Whole Family, joining Howells, Henry James and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, among others. She also became an important voice on religious topics, writing regularly for religious periodicals.

Elizabeth Duquette is Professor of English at Gettysburg College. Her areas of specialty include literature of the American Civil War era and transnational literary culture. She is the author of Loyal Subjects: Bonds of Nation, Race, and Allegiance in Nineteenth-Century America (2010) and the co-editor of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps: Selected Tales, Essays, and Poems (2014) and J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.

Claudia Stokes is Professor of English at Trinity University. She is the author of The Altar at Home: Sentimental Literature and Nineteenth-Century American Religion (2014). She is also the author of Writers in Retrospect: The Rise of American Literary History, 1875-1910 (2006) and co-editor, with Michael A. Elliott, of American Literary Studies: A Methodological Reader (2002). She is currently writing a book about unoriginality and familiarity in nineteenth-century American literature.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781446009208
ISBN 10	1446009203
Title	The Story Of Avis
Author	Elizabeth Phelps
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Read Books
Year published	2010-06-03
Number of pages	456
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.