Doctor Zay

by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

Overview

The heroine of this novel, a rational, rural Maine physician, finds herself courted by a patient whose bones she has patched together after an accident. He is a Boston lawyer who insists that marriage will not end her career. In Doctor Zay, Phelps takes on a subject unusual for 1882: the conflict, as experienced by women, between marriage and career. And as with all of Phelps’s novels, this one is both entertaining and consciousness-raising on class and gender.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781408602584
Publisher:	Malinowski Press
Publication date:	11/07/2008
Pages:	263
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.60(d)

Editorial Reviews

Published in 1882 and long out of print, this novel hinges on a reversal of stereotypical gender roles: in their 20s, the eponymous female Dr. Z. A. Lloyd is a disciplined medical practitioner in Maine, devoted to her patients, and Waldo Yorke is a cultured, but emotionally immature Boston lawyer, recovering from a near-fatal accident, who falls in love with Dr. Zay, his attending physician. Most of the novel, told mainly from Yorke's point of view, recounts in detail his unrequited love for the maddeningly efficient doctor. In bits and pieces she explains her predicament as a female professional: that she would like marriage, but that she is a ``new kind of woman'' and a happy marriage for ``such a woman demands a new type of man.'' Moreover, she says she has known of only three ``real'' marriages and that she ``will not have any happiness that is not the most perfect this world can give me.'' Surprisingly, Yorke convinces both himself and Dr. Zay that he can support her in her career, and the resolution of the novel has a pat, discomfiting ring. Sartisky, executive director of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, provides an illuminating essay that places Phelps's work and themes in historical perspective. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

"Doctor Zay, long out of print, is the earliest US novel showing a woman as a physician at the height of her successful career. Michael Sartisky's afterword ably places the novel within its cultural context."
—Carol Farley Kessler, author of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

"How does a man woo a woman when the usual masculine and feminine roles are reversed? Elizabeth Stuart Phelp's Doctor Zay is at one and the same time an important study of the entrance of women into the medical profession in the nineteenth century and a witty expose of the artificiality of cultural conventions. Its insights into gender roles, marriage, and professional work for women are still pertinent today."
—Elaine Hedges, author of Hearts and Hands


"Doctor Zay, long out of print, is the earliest US novel showing a woman as a physician at the height of her successful career. Michael Sartisky's afterword ably places the novel within its cultural context."
—Carol Farley Kessler, author of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

"How does a man woo a woman when the usual masculine and feminine roles are reversed? Elizabeth Stuart Phelp's Doctor Zay is at one and the same time an important study of the entrance of women into the medical profession in the nineteenth century and a witty expose of the artificiality of cultural conventions. Its insights into gender roles, marriage, and professional work for women are still pertinent today."
—Elaine Hedges, author of Hearts and Hands

From the Publisher