Elizabeth Drew Stoddard (née Barstow, May 6, 1823 – August 1, 1902) was an American writer.
She studied at Wheaton Seminary, Norton, Massachusetts. In 1852, she got married to the critic and poet Richard Henry Stoddard, and the couple settled in New York City, where they started hosting a literary salon. The couple was acquainted with Hawthorne, Lowell, Melville, and Whitman.
Encouraged by her husband, Elizabeth began writing short stories and poems for magazines in the late 1850’s, and published columns of cultural and political commentary in the Daily Alta California. Between 1860 and 1890, she contributed stories, poems and essays to the Harper’s Monthly, Harper’s Bazaar, The Aldine, and The Atlantic Monthly. In her lifetime, Stoddard was compared to Balzac, Hawthorne, and Tolstoi.
She died of pneumonia in 1902.
Books
- The Morgesons (1862)
- Lemorne Versus Huell (1863, short story)
- Temple House (1867)
- Lolly Dinks’ Doings (1874, children’s book)
- Two Men: A Novel (1888)
- Poems (1895)
- Stories, edited by Susanne Opfermann and Yvonne Roth (2003)
- The Selected Letters of Elizabeth Stoddard, edited by Elizabeth Stockton and Jennifer Putzi (2012)
About her
- The Literary Career of Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard, by James Matlack (1967)
- Reinventing Cotton Mather in the American Renaissance: Magnalia Christi Americana in Hawthorne, Stowe, and Stoddard, by Christopher D. Felker (1993)
- American Culture, Canons, and the Case of Elizabeth Stoddard, edited by Robert McClure Smith and Ellen Weinauer (2003)
