Doctor Zay

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.