Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

Mary Gray Phelps was born on 31st August 1844 in Boston, Massachusetts.

Her mother, who wrote the Kitty Brown children’s book series, died when she was only 8. The young girl asked to be renamed in honor of her mother.

Two years later her father married her mother's sister, Mary Stuart, also a writer, but she died of tuberculosis only 18 months later. A mere six months later he married for a third time to Mary Ann Johnson, and they had two sons.

Phelps received an upper-class education through her attendance at the Abbot Academy and Mrs. Edwards' School for Young Ladies. She had a natural gift for story-telling and at 13 she had a story published in Youth's Companion and other stories in various Sunday School publications.

In most of her writings she used her mother's name ‘Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ as a pseudonym, even after her marriage in 1888 to Herbert Dickinson Ward, a journalist (and later co-author with her) 17 years her junior. Such was her talent that she gained a wide audience from her first publications. 

At age 19 she sent her Civil War story ‘A Sacrifice Consumed’ to Harper's Magazine. A generous payment was made together with a request for more works to be sent for publication. 

During the 1860s she wrote her first books for children, the ‘Tiny’ series and followed up with the 4-volume ‘Gypsy Breynton’ series. 

In 1868, three years after the Civil War, came ‘The Gates Ajar’, a controversial but best-selling Spiritualist work which told of an afterlife replete with home comforts and reunited families, and their pets, for eternity. Its success led her to write two more books to complete the trilogy and she was wont to use the word ‘Gates’ in later book titles to allude to this success. She stated that she wrote ‘The Gates Ajar’ to comfort a generation of women devastated by the loss of their loved ones who found no comfort in traditional religion. 

Phelps became a determined advocate through her lectures and other work for social reform, temperance, women's emancipation, and even clothing reform for women, and in 1874, urging them to burn their corsets.

Her deteriorating health was now restricting some of her activities and kept her contributions to mostly literary in nature rather than public appearances.

In 1876 Phelps was the first woman to present a lecture series at Boston University. Her presentations, ‘Representative Modern Fiction’, analyzed the works of George Eliot.

In 1877 she published ‘The Story of Avis’. The work focuses on many of the era’s early feminist issues, portraying a woman's struggle to balance her married life and domestic responsibilities with her longing to become a painter. At no time did she attempt to hide, either in real life or her stories, her contempt of the inequities of the then class structure and gender disparities. Her work, ‘Mary Elizabeth’ depicts a homeless girl's choices between theft and begging as a means of survival. ‘One Way to Get An Education’ tells of a child laborer's desire for a better life than mill work offers and sees self-injuring as a way to a better education. Her work often depicted women succeeding in non-traditional careers such as physicians, ministers, and artists.

In 1884 came her well-regarded poetry collection ‘Songs of the Silent World’

Along with her husband she wrote two Biblical romances in 1890 and 1891. Her autobiography, ‘Chapters from a Life’ was serialized and then published in book form in 1896. 

Phelps continued to write short stories and novels up to her death and over her life authored 57 volumes of fiction, poetry and essays. 

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps died 28th January 1911, in Newton Center, Massachusetts. She was 66.

Horse's Mouth

The Gates Ajar: 'The house feels like a prison''

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