Elizabeth Stoddard papers | WorldCat.org (original) (raw)

Summary:This is a collection of letters, most dating from 1851-1855, that Elizabeth Stoddard wrote. It also includes two of Stoddard's poems, "Mary Booth" and the unpublished "The stone face," and an untitled short story with a photograph of Stoddard. The bulk of the correspondence was addressed to her closest female friend, Margaret Jane Muzzey Sweat. Stoddard writes about literary men and women such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Alfred Tennyson, and others; her relationship with her husband Richard Henry Stoddard; her Barstow relatives, particularly brother Wilson; and her thoughts and beliefs about womanhood. In letters to Josephine and James Lorimer Graham, Stoddard writes of her son Willy's illness and death two months later; the Civil War; advance notice that Carleton will publish her novel, The Morgesons; comments on the success of The Morgesons; becoming acquainted with Edwin Booth, his drinking, and the death of his wife, Mary. Her letters to a "Mrs. Bunce" speak of her husband, Richard Henry Stoddard and also include strong opinions about literature. To Emma Lambourn she writes of the death of Bayard Taylor; to Ernest D. North of Charles Scribners Sons she praises Henry Kingsley's novels. There are letters not written by Stoddard included in the collection. Notably, one written by Emma Carleton to Mrs. Frederick Gotthold in 1911, about reading Stoddard's works