ABSTRACT
ELIZABETH STODDARD “is IN NO SENSE CONVENTIONAL; SHE HAS NO MODELS; she paints human nature as she has seen it, as it really is.” Literary critic Junius Browne applauded Stoddard’s early fiction in the San Francisco Chronicle in September 1887 and championed Stoddard as the “strongest and most individual” author of the nineteenth century. But, he continued, her “flesh and blood creation[s]” are “regarded with suspicion” by the readers of “milk-and-water tales and sugared commonplace characters.” “No author…in the whole republic is so unappreciated today as she is.” Browne hoped that newer reading audiences would appreciate Stoddard’s work as only the “discerning few” had a generation earlier. If her novels “could be read now, with the imprint of a leading house,” he believed she would achieve the successcritical as well as financial-which had eluded her in the 1860s.1
