“Is goodness, then, incompatible with the enjoyment of the senses?” — Elizabeth Stoddard | V2Melody

“Is goodness, then, incompatible with the enjoyment of the senses?”

Challenging the sentimental ideal of female self-denial and passionlessness · Column as Lady Correspondent, Daily Alta California, c. 1856

Elizabeth Stoddard

About Elizabeth Stoddard

Elizabeth Stoddard

6 May 1823–1 August 1902

On a spring day in 1823, in the small coastal village of Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, a child was born who would grow to become one of the most original and underappreciated voices in nineteenth-century American literature. Elizabeth Drew Barstow entered the world on May 6, in a town where the rhythms of the sea…

More by Elizabeth Stoddard

Poems by Elizabeth Stoddard

More remarks by Elizabeth Stoddard

“As I have not many good qualities of disposition I feel sure of this, which as many a member of my family have told me, makes me often hateful. My father said once he never saw any human being with such a talent for the disagreeable.”

Acknowledging a sharp, uncompromising temperament with wry self-knowledge · Letter to Elizabeth Akers Allen, December 1873

“I must own that I am coarse by nature. At times I have an overwhelming perception of the back side of truth.”

Acknowledging a preference for unvarnished reality over refined surfaces · Letter to James Russell Lowell, 5 May 1860

“I pore over my Ms every day, struggle, fight, despair and hope over it.”

Describing the intense, daily labour of composition · Letter to Edmund Clarence Stedman, c. 1861