Elizabeth stoddard: Too Much, too soon, too strange by kim a

Enigmatic much?

In five years of podcasting my co-host Amy Helmes and I

have covered some fascinating women writers, but I don’t

think anyone has haunted me more than Elizabeth

Stoddard. Something about her story and her first novel

The Morgesons has stayed with me and tugged at the

corner of my mind like a puzzle that I have yet to solve.

What is it about Stoddard? In her lifetime her work was

compared to Balzac, Tolstoy, Eliot, the Brontë sisters, and

Nathaniel Hawthorne. The latter was an admirer and so

was Henry James. She may have been a writers’ writer,

but her books didn’t sell very well. In her own words “I

think one copy [of The Morgesons] passed from hand to

hand, but the interest in it soon blew over and I have not

13been noticed there since.” It’s hard to believe once you’ve

read the novel. It’s both brilliant and bold. Some scholars

today consider her one of the most strikingly original

novelists of her time, next to Melville and Hawthorne.

Elizabeth Stoddard, born Elizabeth Barstow in 1823, grew

up in the New England coastal town of Mattapoisett, the

model for Surrey in The Morgesons. Like her heroine, she

was the granddaughter of a tailor and the daughter of a

shipbuilder, raised on the margins of a community where

her family’s financial instability set them apart. Despite

this, she received a strong formal education and was an

avid reader, counting the Brontë sisters among her early

literary influences. From a young age, she was known for

her temperamental nature.

That temperament is on full display in The Morgesons,

which announces itself from the very first line: “That

child,’ said my aunt Mercy, looking at me with indigo-

colored eyes, ‘is possessed.” It’s a startling way to

introduce a heroine. Cassandra is not simply spirited or

unconventional; she is willful, defiant, and uninterested in

conforming to moral expectations. As a child, she learns

she can evade punishment by pretending ignorance; as she

grows older, she continues to test boundaries with an

unapologetic intensity. She doesn’t smooth things over or

try to make herself more palatable. Instead, she can be

blunt, erratic, even difficult to understand. And the novel

doesn’t rush to explain her. Her motivations remain, at

times, elusive and her behavior unpredictable. It’s this

refusal to fully resolve her character, this sense thatsomething essential remains just out of reach, that begins

to explain why she lingers.

Part of what makes The Morgesons linger, though, is not

just Cassandra herself, but the way Stoddard tells her

story. The novel resists the conventions of its time.

Dialogue often appears without clear attribution, scenes

build toward emotional intensity only to break off

abruptly, and characters’ motivations are often difficult to

grasp. There is little sense that the reader is being guided

through the narrative. Instead, the prose feels jagged, even

disorienting, as one critic described it, “pointy and

angular.” In this way, the novel feels less like the moral

clarity of a traditional 19th-century bildungsroman and

more like something closer to Henry James, where

interiority takes precedence over explanation. The novel

doesn’t guide the reader so much as abandon her to the

experience, and like Cassandra herself, it resists

resolution.

And yet, for all its originality, The Morgesons barely

registered when it was initially published. The timing

didn’t help. It came out just days after the Union Army’s

defeat at Bull Run, as the country’s attention turned fully

to war. But circumstance alone doesn’t seem to account

for it. The novel occupies an uneasy space, perhaps too

psychologically complex to align with the moral clarity of

popular 19th-century fiction, yet too structurally unruly to

fit comfortably alongside its more experimental peers. In

many ways, it is a book without a clear literary home.

Perhaps it was precisely this refusal to conform, this

15resistance to resolution, this insistence on ambiguity, that

made it so easy to overlook and yet so difficult to forget.

It’s tempting to say that Stoddard was simply ahead of her

time. And in some ways, she was. The Morgesons is, on

the surface, a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story, but

one that traces not just a search for identity, but for

autonomy and sexual fulfillment within a deeply

constrained world. That tension runs through the novel. It

draws on the brooding intensity of writers like Nathaniel

Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, while also anticipating

the psychological ambiguity of Henry James. The result is

something difficult to place, neither fully aligned with the

moral clarity of popular fiction nor comfortably situated

among more experimental forms. Even its treatment of

female desire feels unusually direct, unsettling in ways

that resist easy interpretation. But being ahead of one’s

time is not always an advantage. Without a clear place in

the literary landscape, the novel had little to anchor it.

That may be part of what gives it its enduring power.

I still don’t think I’ve solved the puzzle of Elizabeth

Stoddard. Maybe that’s the point. There are writers whose

work settles into place once you understand it, whose

characters resolve and whose meanings clarify. The

Morgesons refuses that kind of closure. Cassandra

remains, even at the end, difficult to fully grasp; her

desires, her choices, her contradictions never quite cohere

into something easily explained. And the novel itself

behaves the same way, resisting the structures that might

make it more legible, more containable. Perhaps that is

why it lingers. Not in spite of its opacity, but because of it.Stoddard created something that doesn’t fully yield to

interpretation, and so it stays with you, unresolved, a little

unsettling, and difficult to forget.

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