Elizabeth Stoddard

Poems Elizabeth Stoddard

Elizabeth Drew Stoddard, née Barstow (1823-1902) was an American poet and novelist. After her marriage to poet Richard Henry Stoddard in 1852 she assisted her husband in his literary work, and contributed stories, poems and essays to the periodicals. She is most widely known today as the author of The Morgesons (1862), her first of three novels. Her other two novels are Two Men (1865) and Temple House (1867). She was also a prolific writer of short stories, children's tales, poems, essays, travel writing, and journalism pieces. One major source of Stoddard's importance to American literature is the historicism of her work, the manner in which her writing embodied and subverted the tension of her present-day culture with the archetypal or received values of the American past. Originally published between 1859 and 1890 in such magazines as Harper's Monthly, Harper's Bazaar, and The Atlantic Monthly, Stoddard's stories prove her to have had one of the most original and unique voices in nineteenth-century American literature. Amongst her other works are Poems (1895) and Lemorne Versus Huell (1863).