Elizabeth Stuart Phelps worships work. In her wildly popular first novel, The Gates Ajar (1868), Phelps imagines Heaven itself as a utopian workplace where every person will not only find eternal employment, but eternal success. If, as the saying goes, there ain't no rest for the wicked, Phelps clarifies that there ain't no rest for the righteous, either. “If a talent is given” on Earth, the character Winifred Forcythe explains, “use will be found for it” in Heaven.1 Winifred tells the townspeople in The Gates Ajar how God will re-embody and re-employ them after death. “Employ” is the very word Winifred uses when explaining to a young inventor how his “fancy for machinery will be employed in some way” in heaven. Death will be good for business, Winifred implies, predicting that the engineer “will be more successful inventing there”—in heaven—“than [he] ever will here” (105–06). Moreover, workers in every field will be blessed with the same eternity of work. Artists will be so busy painting in the afterlife that “there will be whole planets turned into galleries of art” (96). There will be libraries too, as authors “will not find their talents hidden in the eternal darkness of a grave” (94). Phelps’ vision of heaven turns what was once a “final resting place” into a final workplace—a good reminder that understanding what it means to work requires defining also what it means to be idle.It is less surprising than it appears, then, that Phelps fixates on idleness in the stories she wrote about her own chosen work of authorship. Over and over again, Phelps’ literary heroines eagerly devote themselves to the writer's life, little expecting the interminable, exhausting idleness that somehow always lies in store. In the short story “The Rejected Manuscript” (1893), a down-on-her-luck novelist named Mrs. Mary Hathorne works extremely hard to, well, work. Despite many rejections from publishers, Mrs. Hathorne refuses to cut her professional losses. Instead, she doubles down on her commitment to writing by making a suspect oath to publish or die: “[The novel] must be printed! I shall keep on sending it—till I die.”2 Mrs. Hathorne becomes so exhausted trying to maintain allegiance to her nonexistent career that by the end of the story she can barely walk to the mailbox to retrieve her own rejection letters. Despite this insanity, in the conclusion Phelps rewards this writer (or curses her depending on how you look at it) with a book deal provided there's a sequel, too. Inevitable yet no less bewildering, idleness—Phelps insists—is part of the woman writer's life.Crises in productivity punctuate Phelps’ narratives about women writers, setting her apart from a literary culture we often remember as distinctly passionate and ambitious.3 Phelps is not the only nineteenth-century American woman writer to fixate on the figure of the idle artist, but she is one of the few in the postbellum period willing to grapple with the subject.4 Narratives by and about women writers in the decades following the Civil War surge with a spirit of industry suited for this time of critical national rebuilding, industrialization, and reform. In the wake of a war that effectively claimed an entire generation of men, postbellum women writers cast themselves as the bastions of purpose and inspiration needed for a nation in reform. It is no coincidence that Jo March in Little Women (1869) first dreams of becoming a Union soldier before she decides to become an author. In a bold proclamation, Jo announces, “I think I shall write books, and get rich and famous,” and then works tirelessly to make that dream a reality—writing through the night without sleep or food in reverence to her “genius.”5 Progress, passion, and industry subtend postbellum women's authorship. As Anne Boyd Rioux puts it: “After the Civil War, women writers began to view authorship much differently, namely as a central part of their identities, leading to the development of new ambitions as they sought to fulfill their potential as artists.”6One can see these “new ambitions” in Phelps herself, who credited her love of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh as inspiration for pursuing the literary life.7 Throughout her writings there are endless variations on the idea that “to do a good thing, one must work hard for it,” and Phelps’ impressive portfolio proves her zeal for such a dictum.8 From a young age Phelps answered to the call of vocation, publishing her first story at the age of nineteen.9 In the decades-long career that followed, Phelps enjoyed a degree of professional success mostly unknown to earlier American women writers as she was embraced by both popular audiences and the literary elite. Phelps holds the distinction of writing one of the bestselling novels of the century, The Gates Ajar, and garnering praise for her talent by some of the most important writers of the era, including George Eliot and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. While nineteenth-century women's writing was more often disparaged than celebrated for artistic merit, historical reviews of Phelps regularly talk of “genius” in her work.10 For these reasons, scholars have considered Phelps a bellwether to a more ambitious and professional mode of women's authorship associated with the rise of realism and other elite literary movements dominated by male authors in the late nineteenth-century.And yet, Phelps’ best known and most autobiographical novel about a woman artist, The Story of Avis (1877), stars her most idle heroine. Readers often remember the painter Avis Dobell for her many inspiring declarations about “my profession as an artist,” “my work,” and “my future.”11 It is for statements like these that The Story of Avis has become so important to critical narratives about postbellum women's authorship. For all her talk, though, Avis actually works surprisingly little. In fact, Phelps keeps tabs on her heroine's idleness like an overseer on the factory floor, pointing out to the reader whenever Avis’ paintings go unfinished and for how long.For Avis’ career is a torment. Avis struggles to remain motivated to work, and in so doing she challenges some fundamental assumptions about the role of ambition in Phelps’ legacy and in postbellum women's writing more generally. Considering Phelps was known for her own “extraordinary productivity,” for being “aggressive in selling her writing,” and for working so hard as to become frequently ill, it is both surprising and not that her “favorite heroine” is plagued by burnout.12 Beyond Phelps’ own legacy, the story of the idle Avis also articulates an untold story about the postbellum woman writer—one that most of Phelps’ contemporaries felt did not belong in the “new” and “divergent” script of late-nineteenth-century women's authorship.13 Against the spirited chorus of hardworking heroines that other women writers dreamed up for the newly reformed nation, Phelps’ Avis gives voice to a perverse, even illicit, desire to simply give up on one's dreams. The voice of idleness in this novel is discordant—at times subversive, tragic, pitiful, even funny—falling short of any cohesive critique of industry that readers today might wish for. Nevertheless, through Avis, Phelps explores what was most untenable to the postbellum nation: idleness.Phelps’ writings about idle women artists make visible for readers a divergent and less inspiring literary history of the postbellum woman writer—one that is less concerned with dreams of work than it is the realities they disavow. In order to bring this story to light, in the next section I survey the development of Phelps’ thinking about idleness and the woman writer prior to her fascinating exploration of it in The Story of Avis. Even in her early works, Phelps stands apart as one of the few postbellum women writers to scrutinize the very thing she and so many of her generation passionately devoted themselves to: work. Phelps’ fraught attempts to do this work illustrate that idleness was a tricky subject for women to write about in the postbellum period, and in some ways an even trickier subject for readers to engage with today.In an 1867 article about women's work titled “What Shall They Do?” Phelps claimed that all the sadness of life as a woman in postbellum America could be traced, not to the recent Civil War as one might expect, but unemployment or “the want of something to do.” “Whether for self-support, or for pure employment's sake,” Phelps writes, “the search for work . . . is at the bottom of half the feminine miseries of the world.”14 Using what would later become her most famous motif, Phelps imagines herself standing at the pearly “gates of authorship” peering “down below” on crowds of aspiring women writers “turn[ed] away in great sad groups, shut out.” Distanced but not detached, Phelps finds this spectacle “sorrowful to see.” Readers might expect Phelps to transform this sorrowful image into motivational material about the right for women to pursue their professional dreams. But she doesn't. Instead, Phelps wonders whether literary passion does more harm than good: “Why will people persist in such utterly hopeless efforts?”15Despite Phelps’ question here, most postbellum women writers did not see the project of becoming an author as “utterly hopeless.” To the contrary, they perpetuated inspiring stories of women artists who, by virtue of their passion for art, went on to accomplish great things. The story of the inspired and industrious woman writer remains one of the most enduring told about nineteenth-century women's authorship. Literary scholars stress the radical prioritization of work and artistic ambition as defining characteristics of the postbellum woman writer. Reciting what is now the dominant paradigm for understanding this shift in postbellum women's authorship, Susan K. Harris explains: “Work becomes the central goal for the protagonists of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women's novels, work overtly defined as occupation other than domesticity.”16 What distinguishes postbellum women's authorship, then, is women passionately choosing to work as writers. Thus one answer to Phelps’ question about why idleness is such a source of misery to literary women is because those lucky to pass through the gates of authorship continuously tell them it is.While I do not wish to re-open debates about whether nineteenth-century women's writing is “any good,” it is worth asking whether postbellum women writers are any good at writing about idleness.17 The postbellum period witnessed some of the most inspired and empowering writings by and for American women with texts on the New Woman, the Coming Woman, women's suffrage, marriage reform, and increased participation in the workplace. Yet, the very same writers known for their advocacy of women's issues offer some particularly thorny—even uncharitable—opinions about idle women that modern-day readers are sure to find alienating.For example, in her feminist manifesto on women's rights titled Woman's Wrongs: A Counter-Irritant (1868), Mary Abigail Dodge (aka Gail Hamilton) argues that women without work are unacceptable in the modern era—an affront to the women's movement and its cornerstone belief in the pursuit of progress through productivity. No matter the kind of work, conditions, or pay, Hamilton insists that “any coarse manual work is better than idleness.” Even more bluntly, Hamilton says, “It is better to dig than to beg.”18 Anne Boyd Rioux talks about the “taboo against ambition” amongst late-nineteenth-century women writers, but idleness was equally disavowed.19 After the Civil War, accusations of idleness amongst women became accusations of professional and political failure.The narratives women wrote about their work as writers in this period reflect this uncomfortable intolerance of idleness. Postbellum artist-heroines are nothing if not spirited about their work, and for every rare statement of disillusionment about their careers, there are tens of quotable, inspiring statements to correct their course. After the Civil War, narratives about the woman writer began to shed the discourse of economic insecurity that had been so useful to earlier authors. Recall Fanny Fern's famous dictum: “No happy woman ever writes.”20 In the postbellum period, women authors invested in stories about heroines who were happily inspired to work and went on to do inspiring things.One might consider any one of Alcott's heroines, famous for their professional aspirations, to witness the postbellum spirit of industry at work. In the novel Work: A Story of Experience (1873), Alcott doesn't just celebrate the industriousness of modern women but insists upon it. In the opening chapter, Christie Devon vows to work hard: “I want work that I can put my heart into.”21 She makes good on her promise, landing not just one job but seven over the course of the novel, including creative ones—as an actress, governess, seamstress, farmhand, labor activist, and Civil War nurse. Christie's impressive resume speaks to the new world of economic opportunity that many postbellum women found available to them after the Civil War. Wartime losses paving the way to job growth for women is an oft-repeated story in American history and, as Phelps herself argued in 1871, the idea that “women have no business talent” was nothing but “an old story” in the newly reformed nation. Indeed, this period saw more women entering the workforce than ever before.22 Female readers of Work would have been right to feel, as Christie does, that “it's a grand time to live, a splendid chance to do and suffer” (291).Considering this novel's title, perhaps it follows that Alcott hardly ever depicts Christie out of work. But what is surprising is that the one time Alcott does, she immediately attempts to kill poor Christie off! When the industrious Christie finds herself unemployed for the one and only time in the novel, she berates herself for lacking the patience and wisdom to “find her place” in the world and resolves to take her own life: “Better give up trying, and leave room for those who have something to live for.” A woman of her word, Christie gives up in a big way by jumping off a bridge. That she is rescued and eventually meets a happy ending suggests there is hope for Christie, but the expediency with which Alcott delivers this unemployed heroine to the brink of death is disturbing. Alcott's message is clear: a heroine without work is a heroine with no place in the modern woman's world, and thus, no reason for being (123).Whether by design or neglect, postbellum women writers perpetuated a culture of silence—even derision—surrounding idleness. In the novels they wrote about their work, postbellum women seem to echo something Elizabeth Stoddard once wrote about the painter Rosa Bonhaur: “I like to chronicle the success of a woman. If there be any so valiant as to trench on the domain appropriated by men for themselves, I hasten to do them honor!”23 Bouts of idleness necessarily attend a life devoted to work, but stories that address this reality did not perhaps ring “valiant” enough to women writers intent on honoring their professional progress.These opinions are uncomfortable to read because they hinge upon a distinctly feminist intolerance for the condition of unemployment. Even Phelps is prone to presenting “unoccupied” women as failures to their sex and nation in early writings. She once argued that women and men ought to be considered equal—equally ashamed, that is, to be idle: “Society lays its stern, derisive ban upon the unoccupied man. . . . A woman should be just as much ashamed of having nothing to do as a man.”24One reason, then, that accounts of postbellum women's authorship have been cast in the language of ambition and work is because exploring the other side of this coin requires readers to navigate some rather uninspiring issues in progressive women's history. Perhaps born of the “need to give meaning to the [Civil War's] losses,” women writers chastised those who they felt were wasting precious opportunity rather than capitalizing on it.25 After so many men's lives were cut short by the Civil War—most between the ages of twenty and twenty-four—for the women who remained, to employ one's time on earth was to honor the nation's past and advance women's future.26Though Phelps felt compelled to write about idleness and literary work, she struggled to do so in a culture that equated women's progress with productivity. Phelps’ writings in the early 1870s are considered her most class-conscious work, yet the subject of idleness is often tamed or supplanted by the industrious rhetoric of the times. Such is the case with The Silent Partner (1871), a novel regularly seen as the apex of Phelps’ writing about labor and class before she ostensibly turned to the woman problem in her next novel, The Story of Avis.27 Because The Silent Partner is about factory labor reform, Phelps’ mismanagement of idleness in the story is particularly striking.As an early practitioner of literary realism, Phelps believed the author's job was “to tell the truth about the world [she] lives in,” as she writes in Chapters from a Life (256), and to her credit, The Silent Partner recognizes that ambivalence about work was an un-ignorable truth about the world in the 1870s. In the novel's preface, Phelps calls for a reality-check amongst her readers who need to address “the facts” about “the disaffections which exist between labor and capital, between employer and employed, between ease and toil.” As the preface explains, it was Phelps’ own “less cheerful reading . . . from the pages of the Reports of the Massachusetts Bureau of the Statistics of Labor” that apprised her of souring labor relations in her home state and inspired her to write The Silent Partner.28 The MBSL reports published throughout the 1870s constituted the first governmental survey of unemployment in any state of the union. It is largely because of these widely publicized reports that “unemployment” took on its “modern meaning” in this period, and the idle became increasingly recognized as a “disturbing presence” in the nation.29 If in the antebellum period Americans’ fears of idleness were exacerbated by a general lack of knowledge about external economic trends, the MBSL reports on labor were written to combat such “industrial hypochondria” by relying on the new, popular scientific use of statistics to “ascertain” the “actual status” of the “laboring men, women, and children of Massachusetts.”30Phelps’ use of the MBSL reports in The Silent Partner is in itself a rich topic for analysis, but just as interesting is how persistent the feminist intolerance of idleness in this novel remains in spite of Phelps’ reading about the horrors of what it meant to work in the textile industry.31 Phelps attempts to indict the “abuses of the factory system” while somehow still preserving the industrious spirit of her time (7). The reformist heroine, Perley Kelso, recognizes how exploitative her family's textile mill has become and sympathizes with many of the mill girls, especially the novel's other protagonist, Sip Garth. Yet Perley cannot abide Sip's lack of ambition in work, forcing her to try different kinds of jobs hoping to spark some aspiration in her. Neither can Phelps abide the story of the discouraged worker. In fact, Perley's shining moment of self-actualization occurs when she breaks up a strike. Perley looks at labor reform as “a job I mean to finish” and in this framework idleness is inherently opposed to progress (108).Readers are right to feel frustrated by Perley's strikebreaking in The Silent Partner, but they ought then to rally around the idle Avis Dobell in The Story of Avis.32 Though it cannot be said that Phelps gives us a heroine on strike in The Story of Avis, she certainly delivers one with a knack for resisting work. Avis repeatedly defers working with half-hearted promises like, “I shall get to work tomorrow,” or, “By and by. After a while. I must wait a little” (78, 149). One can almost hear the comedic exasperation in Phelps’ voice when she likens Avis to “any broken-hearted woman who was not going to paint a great picture tomorrow,” as if such an archetype existed (84).Avis Dobell is one of the most famous artist-heroines in nineteenth-century American women's fiction, but not for the reasons I explore in the next section. Phelps’ Avis has become symbolic of the industrious postbellum woman writer: a woman who “is devoted to her career and sees herself first and foremost as an artist.”33 But devotion and declarations alone do not an artist make, as Phelps demonstrates each time Avis’ work (and passion for it) idles. Phelps’ mix of progressive gender politics with bourgeois economics makes her early writings about workers and idlers difficult to parse. But for those willing to stick with it, sustained attention to Phelps’ writings about career women illustrate a mind grappling with how to write about idle women in industrious times.Readers are most familiar with Avis Dobell when her artistic career is booming. Whether she is studying abroad, musing about Aurora Leigh, dreaming of sphinxes, or painting portraits in her studio, Avis at work is the Avis readers know best: inspired, bold, and ambitious. But idleness and industry make for strange bedfellows in Phelps’ writings about artistic work, and attention to the former reveals a much more ambivalent portrait of this influential woman-artist figure.In industrious times, Avis feels “electrically prescient” to her promising future, and she is never shy about saying so (53). For example, the young Avis proudly announces to her father, “I should like to be an artist if you please,” after being inspired by Aurora Leigh (33). In good faith she pursues that intention with verve, studying art abroad and exhibiting her paintings in the elite salons of Paris. When she returns to America at the start of the novel, she does so with full knowledge of her “brilliant future” (9). Energized by working on her first commission stateside, a portrait of the handsome and eligible Philip Ostrander, Avis exclaims, “I am so glad to be at work! . . . so gravely, gravely, glad” (54–55). In fact, she finds the work so fulfilling that she resents when Philip tries to become anything more than her artistic subject. She boldly rejects his first proposal, clarifying her priorities for him (and readers) once again: “Marriage . . . is a profession to a woman, and I have my work!” (71). In her most productive periods Avis resembles Phelps: a talented artist who preaches the supreme importance of work in women's lives.Less familiar to readers, however, is the idle Avis who appears like clockwork whenever inspiration busts. If Avis is most articulate and self-possessed when she is painting—empowered enough to reject marriage proposals and demand professional respect—then she is withdrawn and self-sabotaging when idle. The idle Avis can be found staring wistfully at blank canvases, succumbing to lethargy in bed for many days, avoiding her studio at all costs, or even destroying her own art. “Enforced idleness” makes Avis “purposeless and spasmodic” (96). Gone are her bold proclamations about working women and in their place are confusing silences and abandoned dreams.Idleness is identified early in the novel as the greatest obstacle to Avis’ artistic development when she suddenly finds herself unable to work just as her career takes off. After Avis makes her successful debut in the salons of Paris, she collapses rather than blooms: “success overtook her with more the grip of paralysis than the thrill of a delight.” Avis falls “ill upon her bed” for two full days after hearing the good news, and “for a week she did not enter the studio” (38). That Avis becomes more idle the more she achieves is difficult to explain. For some nineteenth-century women writers, like Alcott, a boom and bust mentality was applied to models of artistic genius, viewing wild fluctuations in productivity as a sign of literary passion and talent. One might recall the volatile Jo March who works herself into a “vortex” of creativity for days at a time, unable to sleep or eat until her the fit of inspiration has subsided. Phelps, however, rejects the “fine frenzy” model of artistry by having her Avis experience fits of idleness instead (77).Phelps blurs the categories of idleness and industry by having Avis not only resist creating, but by having her destroy her own work. Avis rarely experiences the metaphorical fire of inspiration, but she does start a literal fire in her studio after a prolonged period of not working. Upon returning to America, Avis’ career takes a “sedative” turn as she receives just one commission stateside (a portrait of her future husband). She sits “entire days before an untouched canvas” and endures sleepless nights. Unable to find inspiration enough to get back to work, Avis decides to destroy it instead and sets fire to as many half-finished sketches as she can. If not for her father's intervention, Avis’ “fine frenzy” would have decimated her life's work, leaving her with a “cold, barren start” in the middle of her story (76–77). Avis’ work becomes nothing other than a haunting a reminder of being out of work. Through this fit of idleness, Phelps shows what happens when women artists are well-supplied with inspiration to devote themselves to work, but left tragically unprepared for the inconsistencies in employment that can attend such a choice.Phelps brings the woman artist into conflict with idleness at multiple junctures in The Story of Avis, but it is through Avis’ own storytelling in the paintings she creates (and the ones she leaves unfinished) that Phelps makes her clearest appeal to women writers to address issues of idleness in their art—even if doing so threatened to derail the more inspiring and industrious narrative that came to define postbellum women's writing. This is the unfinished work of Avis, both character and text: to give equal expression to both dreams of work and realities of idleness in the woman writer's story.So much intellectual energy has been devoted to interpreting Avis’ masterwork, “The Riddle of the Sphinx,” that we forget about all the work she leaves unfinished in its wake. Avis mostly abandons her art swiftly and unceremoniously, but there is one unfinished work that she cannot seem to forget. That painting, as Phelps first describes it, takes for its subject something much closer to home than any mythic symbol of the desert: When she raised her eyes, they fell upon forms and faces grown gaunt with toil—an old woman sowing sparse seed in a chill place; a lantern-flash on a miner's stooping face; the brow and smile of a starving child; sailors abandoned on a frozen sea; a group of factory women huddling in the wind; the poisoned face of a lead-worker . . . two huge hands knotted with labor, and haggard with famine, thrust groping out upon the dark. (82)Like the Sphinx, this vision is an expression of women's longing, but in lieu of the Sphinx's “dumb lips parted,” here Avis sees “knotted hands . . . groping.” Unlike the Sphinx—a single, transcendent symbol for the “mystery of womanhood”—this is a far more collective, heterogenous vision of struggle. Whether man or woman, child or parent, in factories or farms, the class struggle wears many “forms and faces.” Avis never paints this vision, but neither does Phelps let her forget it. This painting that could have been reminds readers—as it reminds Avis—that all great works of genius do not simply materialize out of thin air but come from somewhere. In the case of Avis’ “Sphinx,” genius is born of her decision to abandon the labor subject.Avis’ refusal to depict the labor problem in her art is in itself not that interesting, but the reasons she refuses the subject are, for they illuminate Phelps’ own complicated ideas about that slippery term “experience” and the realist writer's duty to honor it. Considering how dominant the themes of inspiration and industry are in postbellum stories about woman artists, Avis’ choice to avoid painting forms and faces of discouraged workers makes some sense. However, her explanation for dismissal of the subject has less to do with expectations and more to do with her lacking experience. Avis asks how she could “dare” to depict the plight of the working class when she has never experienced such “want and woe.” Her life experience has been too limited to do justice to this subject, making her “too happy, too young, too sheltered, to understand” (82). Mostly, she's right.Heroines in Phelps’ fiction often overcome sheltered lives by forging relationships across class divides, but the working-class presence in this novel mostly serves to remind readers just how little Avis is aware of it. After all, she is the privileged daughter of a “well-salaried” professor (21) and happens to live in a space that is geographically divided by class. “The rich” or “the intelligence of society” remain cloistered in the town's academic center while “the poor” or “aching people” keep to the tenement buildings at the “lower end of town” (158–59). One must ask whether Avis is suited to paint the stories of those we don't hear more of in this novel—the marginalized working-class of Harmouth. Is Avis the right artist for the job?That Avis paints the Sphinx instead would suggest no, but this only makes Phelps’ continued insistence on the labor subject all the more perplexing. For Phelps does insist that Avis’ true calling is to paint the plight of the working class. Avis realizes this while visiting Harmouth's “dangerous classes”: Avis understood that night how the insight of a single hour, like a torch, may flare out across the width and breadth of a life's work. She understood how great men have seen the drawing of great purposes . . . gone false in the revel