Stories

Today, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911) is best known for a handful of her novels: The Gates Ajar (1868), The Silent Partner (1871), and The Story of Avis (1877). During her life, however, the short story was a hugely popular genre in which she was fully invested and where she made a good deal of her living. Stories were her earliest and latest publications, and they were work that she both enjoyed and employed to greater ends. From 1864 to her death in 1911, she published almost one hundred and fifty short stories in the leading periodicals of the day. This collection makes available some of those stories, an important and engaging part of her oeuvre that previously has been all but ignored. Phelps saw her narratives as vehicles through which she could reform her society, and her artistic and political vision is both original and transformative. Sections and stories include: 1. “A story is a story, however large”: Writing for Children — How June Found Massa Linkum 12 • Bobbit’s Hotel 19 • One Way to Get an Education 24 • The Girl Who Could Not Write a Composition 29 • Mary Elizabeth 36 2. “A fact which I think Mr. Tennyson has omitted”: Writing under the Influence — The Lady of Shalott 45 • The Christmas of Sir Galahad 54 • The True Story of Guenever 60 3. “I went, I saw, I conquered”: Rewriting the Church — A Woman’s Pulpit 71 • Saint Caligula 86 • The Reverend Malachi Matthew 94 4. “The young woman’s account”: Writing Women’s Sexuality — Magdalene 107 • At Bay 118 • Doherty 131 5. “Thousands of pale women know”: Writing Women and the Civil War — A Sacrifice Consumed 139 • My Refugees 147 • Margaret Bronson 163 6. “Replace the old brutal heroisms”: Writing Women’s Adventures — Mavourneen 176 • Wrecked in Port 181 • The Chief Operator 189 7. “Suspecting a Spiritualistic medium”: Writing Spiritualism — What Was the Matter? 202 • The Day of My Death 215 • Since I Died 234 • Told in Trust 238 8. “A new type of employer”: Writing Social Reform — Blythe 252 • My Story 257 • Not a Pleasant Story 262 • Tammyshanty 273https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/zeabook/1135/thumbnail.jp

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

The well-educated daughter of a minister, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911) was introduced to writing at a young age, as both her mother and father were published writers. In 1868 she published her first major novel, The Gates Ajar. An international success, the novel sold more than six hundred thousand copies, making it one of the best-selling American works of the nineteenth century. Through the next four decades Phelps published hundreds of essays, tales, and poems, which appeared in every major American periodical, while also writing novels, including Beyond the Gates (1883) and The Gates Between(1887). Phelps’s legacy as an important American writer, however, has been hurt by the seeming contradictions between her life and work. For example, she was an ardent advocate for women’s rights both inside and outside marriage, but her stories seem to glorify the sort of extreme self-sacrifice associated with the most conservative domestic ideology. In this collection, the editors seek to restore Phelps’s reputation by bringing together a diverse collection from the entire body of her lifetime of work. From arguments for suffrage to harrowing tales of Reconstruction, these essays, along with short fiction and poetry, provide a new perspective on a major American writer from the later nineteenth century

The Gates Ajar

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s 1868 Reconstruction-era novel The Gates Ajar, in its portrait of inconsolable grief following the American Civil War, helped to shape enduring American ideas about heaven and demonstrated that for American women, the war didn’t simply end at Appomattox. When Mary Cabot loses her beloved brother, Union soldier Royal, in the war, she feels as though she will never feel peace again until the arrival of her widowed aunt Winifred. Sharing the wisdom that has comforted her through her grief, Winifred offers Mary a groundbreaking view of the afterlife: a place of loving reunion with all those who were lost. As Winifred ministers to Mary, her vision of the afterlife circulates in the community and attracts local adherents who have similarly suffered losses in the war. Written with the intention of illuminating and bettering the lives of women after the war, The Gates Ajar is an empowering manifesto on conquering grief and a timeless manual for optimism.https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/books/1154/thumbnail.jp

Chapters from a life,

Includes reminiscences of several American writers.Mode of access: Internet

Poetic studies.: By Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.

1 p. L., [vii]-ix, [11]-141 p ; 17 cm.Electronic text and image data. Ann Arbor, Mich. : University of Michigan, Digital Library Initiatives, 1996. Includes both TIFF files and keyword searchable text. [Making of America] This volume is made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

The silent partner. By Elizabeth Stuart Phelps.

1 p. L., [v]-viii, [9]-302 p. 18 cm