Elizabeth Stuart Phelps: A Reflection of Her First Literary Works

In a collection of authors speaking of writing, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps takes a moment to reflect on her beginnings as a writer. With a tone not unlike her stories, cool, almost distant but tinged with a slight pleasant surprise, Phelps looks back at her start with mildly raised eyebrows. But she mentions two things that I really want to bring to the forefront in this blog. The first is about the independence of the working woman and her power in that role. The second is the dilemma of the writer, especially in the his/her first few years.

She starts the first topic off by mentioning writers who said they wrote simply for the act of writing. She expresses a wish for such a luxury, but has never been in the position for such an opportunity. She claims that:
"I am proud to be a working woman, and always had to be; though I ought to add that I am sure the proposal that my father's allowance to his daughter should cease, did not come from the father." She could have lived off her allowance quite happily. It may not have been a large amount, but probably enough to get her by. However, she felt the need to make her own way and her father was supportive of his endeavor. As is seen by his pleasure at her first publication.

After seeing her first story in Harpers magazine, she expresses having felt a "throb of pleasure greater than I supposed then that life could hold." She feels this pleasure because she now knows that she could support herself and proceeds to do that from then on. This kind of sentiment strongly reflects her beliefs in women's reform, of which she is noted to have encouraged women to burn their corsets. She says that while one may hesitate to mention the pleasure of independent working all one has to do is think of:

"the thousands of women who find it to easy to be dependent on too heavily weighted and too generous men, one hesitates no longer to say anything that may help those other thousands of women who stand on their own feet, and their own pluck, to understand how good a thing it is to be there."

She truly believes in the power of a woman who has control of her own life. In these quotes she subtly expresses a motivation for her writing. She wants to speak out against the women who are willing to work and suffer under the yolk of men when they could embrace their own power. She wants to encourage and support those women who are already out there trying to work for themselves. Her writing is a celebration of the working woman and a call to arms for all the domestic slaves chained to their men.

This kind of reform and rally is seen in many of her works, both books and short stories. In many of her works she expresses her dismissal of the domestic power women had once embraced and urges then to seek power out in the financial world. A domain formerly ran by men. This can also be seen in The Lady of Shalott. The Lady, who is bedridden, and chained by her domestic settings, is a creature given to fantasy and the romantic. Her sister who interacts with the capital world and work hard to earn a living is realistic and down to earth. Who in the end survives? Phelps isn't trying to show contempt or scorn for The Lady. Instead she wants to invoke pity and the understanding that although the situation is through no cause of her own, it is a situation that smothers and eventually kills its inhabitants.

Her other intriguing point is her view of the life of a writer. She starts off by talking about how she and her armour would take the time in the evening to read passages from whatever manuscript they were working on. She mentions three of them that never sent into a publisher simply because they were the early scribblings of a would be author. However, she looks back on these writing fondly because she says that writings like these get out the "apprenticeship which does, in some cases, finds its way into type, and devastate the endurance of a patient public." She admits straight up that she wrote bad first drafts in the beginning. She doesn't mind readers knowing that these manuscripts were her test subjects of her new talent. There is no subterfuge with her.

She also recalls on when her first piece was accepted into Harpers Magazine and she showed her father, the delight she felt at his pleasure, astonishment and praise. Because of this very good first impression in the world of writing, Phelps continued with her new found profession. But she admits the "humiliating fact" that if her first story had been rejected, she would have stopped writing. I find this extremely interesting because she contradict herself later on by saying that:

"Write, if you must; not otherwise. Do not write, if you can earn a fair living at teaching or dressmaking, at electricity or hod-carrying. Make shoes, weed cabbages, survey land, keep house, make ice-cream, sell cake, climb a telephone pole. Nay, be a lightning-rod peddler or a book agent, before you set your heart upon it that you shall write for a living. Do anything honest, but do not write, unless God calls you, and publishers want you, and people read you, and editors claim you."

She admitted earlier that her writing was "nothing of the stuff that heroines and genuises are made of in a shy and self-distrustful girl, who had no faith in her own capabilities, and, indeed, at that time the smallest possible amount of interest in the subject." So she felt no confidence in her writing. She would have given up her writing if she had been met with rejection the first few times she sent her writing out into the real world. But then later on claims that for those who write, there is no other way. That even though the pay is worse than any other honest job they could find, it would never be enough to appease the hunger that writing abates. I think that this is an intriguing insight to a writer's mind. We, as readers, often presume that writers have this lofty meaning to everything they write. That it is all with purpose and that they must walk around with poetic lines of prose pouring out of mind and mouth. But contrary to that, there is a life of uncertainty, doubt, hardship and discouragement.

Phelps claims that living for the pen, isn't so much living but "it is more likely to be dying by your pen; despairing by your pen; burying your heart and hope and youth and courage in your inkstand." She entreats writers to think long and hard about their motivation to write because "unless you are prepared to work like a slave at his galley, for the toss-up chance of a freedom which may be denied him when his work is done, do not write. There are some pleasant things about this way of spending a lifetime, but there are no easy ones." She wonders whether writers may have been happier in another profession, but speculates that "time alone- perhaps one might say, eternity- can answer."

I think this line of though really entreats one to speculate on the journey to being a writer. Were some writer smacked in the face with it from the beginning? Or were they lead to it slowly, through many years and different professions? Often with writers whom have died or who we consider to "literary giants" to be ones that were born to the craft and with this brilliant insight that automatically sees and knows things in a completely different manner from those around them.

What we forget is that these renown authors, these intelligent writers are people too. No doubt they have intellect, they wouldn't be able to write as they do if otherwise. However, they weren't just created that way. They went through the anxieties, misgivings and other self-doubts that all other writers go through, no matter their prowess with the written word.  They had to work hard and earn their place in the literary world and although they may not have felt confident in the beginning, they grew into that place and learned that nothing else would have been better.

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