‘I rebel against the story. I am sure the half of it was never told us’: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ ‘The True Story of Guenever’ and Nineteenth-Century Women in the Literary Marketplace

Abstract

We examine a short story about the queen’s sexual desires as ones of thought, not deed, in the context of Phelps’ own history as a successful novelist to consider the larger politics of writing women’s stories (both historical and fictional) and ways of knowing about women’s lives.