Story of Avis, the

Choose a career or choose a family: Ward’s 1877 novel exposes and eviscerates the false dichotomy of modern womanhood

Avis Dobell is a talented young painter on the rise, working to establish herself, when she meets professor Philip Ostrander. Though she has sworn to never marry and at first rejects her suitor, she relents after he returns wounded from the Civil War. Ultimately, Avis fills her days with thoughts of doilies and daycare instead of paints and palettes. Following Avis’ struggles to balance her passion with her duties, Phelps’ novel proves that artistic ambition is not extinguished by love, but slowly eroded by the constraints of 19th-century womanhood.
Feminist and social reformer Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward (1844–1911) authored 57 books. She is perhaps best remembered for the trilogy of Spiritualist novels that she published in the wake of the Civil War—the first of which, The Gates Ajar, had sold 180,000 copies in the US and England by 1900.