ABSTRACT
LATE IN HER LITERARY CAREER, THE AMERICAN WRITER ELIZABETH STUART Phelps engaged in a business dispute with the Century’s editor Richard Watson Gilder. Phelps denied Gilder’s charge that she expected too much for her work, asking, “Have you not welcomed this contributor for thirty years? I know my prices are not small,…[b]ut I think I have always accepted what you offered me, in payments without comment —have I not?”1 Yet Phelps also rejected the notion put forward by Gilder that she must think more of “monied value” than of the moral worth of her fiction. In keeping with her life-long conviction about the affinities between art and morality, Phelps insisted to Gilder that a writer could produce a “successful union of art and ethics.”2
