EOS

Since Mary Alice Wyman began the academic work of recovering the life and work of Elizabeth Oakes Smith in the mid-1920s, Oakes Smith’s once widely recognizable figure has only gradually returned to our conversations about the development of American culture.

Like so many women writers of the nineteenth century, her recovery has been impeded by modernist assumptions about literary value ("good literature" is complex, unified, and difficult) and by patriarchal ideology generally, but when the "first wave" of these women writers' recovery took place in the 1960s and 70s, Oakes Smith's work, predictably "trashed" by the same arbiters of serious literature who had dismissed Fanny Fern, E.D.E.N. Southworth and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, was somehow left in the shadows.   

Reasons for this delayed recovery are hardly settled, but one of the them is certainly the difficulty, until very recently, of physically obtaining copies--or even a look--at some of her major texts.  Since 2023, Mercer University Press has begun to make Oakes Smith’s work available in book form in fully edited and annotated editions (tell your library!), but even the 1000+ pages of The Selected Writings in three volumes will be missing a mass of Oakes Smith’s important work. Tools for annotating linked texts are not yet integrated, but the Elizabeth Oakes Smith website will continue to provide a huge supplement to the printed volumes, offering basic information to scholars new to EOS along with quick access to hundreds of pieces of Oakes Smith's uncollected work through stable digital archives.

We also provide a forum for new discoveries on our Blog space to enable scholars to share experiences and insights that will help frame, for a new generation, her major influence on literary and political discourse during a lifetime that spanned nearly ninety years of the nineteenth century.