ABSTRACT
APPEARING A YEAR AFTER DANIEL DERONDA, THE PUBLICATION AND RECEPTION of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Story of Avis serves as a culminating case study of the historical, political, economic, and aesthetic trends encountered by Stowe, Eliot, and Phelps throughout the 1870s. Where Eliot had repudiated false professional strictures, Phelps amalgamated the market role of the professional within her own aesthetic vision. Where Stowe had tried to claim an aesthetic and specifically feminine sensibility akin to, but decidedly removed from, Woman’s Rights, Phelps saw her art as intimately bound up with the suffrage and worker’s rights movements, going one step further than Stowe’s representation of Lady Byron to articulate, in Avis, both a blatant artistheroine as well as a mythological country of womanhood-a country symbolized by the metaphorical concept of an all-encompassing Sphinx. And where both Stowe and Eliot had resisted commercial trends (even when employing them), Phelps had less difficulty commodifying her artistry and selling it to the group of readers she most hoped to influence: those “helpless, outnumbering, unconsulted” women.
