SOURCE: “Elizabeth Stuart Phelps: Professional Women and Traditional Wedlock,” in Plots and Proposals: American Women's Fiction, 1850-90, University of Illinois Press, 2000, pp. 148-80.

In the following essay, Tracey explores the duality of Phelps's female characters as both radical career women and conventional marriage partners.

A declared reformer and advocate for women's rights, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps ranks with Laura J. Curtis Bullard as the most openly radical of the writers considered in this study. In particular, she believed that women deserved better education and access to a wider range of employment opportunities. Critics have praised her for the overt feminism of The Story of Avis (1877) and Doctor Zay (1882), both of which demonstrate feminist principles that she also expressed in a series of essays.¹ In the two novels Phelps combines character development with double proposals to depict heroines whose initial desire to forego marriage in favor of careers gives way...