Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Literature in English, North America Commons™
Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Discipline
- Publication Type
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Literature in English, North America
Stories, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Roxanne Harde , Editor
Stories, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Roxanne Harde , Editor
Zea E-Books Collection
Today, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911) is best known for a handful of her novels: The Gates Ajar (1868), The Silent Partner (1871), and The Story of Avis (1877). During her life, however, the short story was a hugely popular genre in which she was fully invested and where she made a good deal of her living. Stories were her earliest and latest publications, and they were work that she both enjoyed and employed to greater ends. From 1864 to her death in 1911, she published almost one hundred and fifty short stories in the leading periodicals of the day. This …
A “Hired Girl” Testifies Against The “Son Of A Prominent Family”: Bastardy And Rape On The Nineteenth-Century Nebraska Plains, Donna Rae Devlin
A “Hired Girl” Testifies Against The “Son Of A Prominent Family”: Bastardy And Rape On The Nineteenth-Century Nebraska Plains, Donna Rae Devlin
Department of History: Faculty Publications
In Red Cloud, Nebraska, in 1887, Anna “Annie” Sadilek (later Pavelka) pressed bastardy charges against the “son of a prominent family,” even though she could have, according to her pretrial testimony, pressed charges for rape. To the literary world, Sadilek is better known as Ántonia Shimerda, the powerful protagonist in Willa Cather’s 1918 novel, My Ántonia. However, it is Sadilek’s real-life experience that allows us to better understand life on the Nebraska Plains, specifically through an examination of the state’s rape laws and the ways these laws were subsequently interpreted by the courts. The Nebraska Supreme Court, between 1877 …