Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

Ward, circa 1910

Ward wrote three Spiritualist novels. The first, The Gates Ajar, became her most famous. It took her two years to write. She wrote later that after she spent more than two years revising it, "I could have said it by heart." The book was finally published after the end of the Civil War. In it, she writes about a girl named Mary Cabot, whose brother was killed during the Civil War. The grief-stricken girl becomes convinced that she and her brother will be reunited in an afterlife[4] in which people retain their physical shapes and personalities.[2]

The book became very popular, in part from its positive portrayal of death shortly after the Civil War, during which more than 400,000 individuals lost their lives.[2] It also received a great deal of criticism for the way Phelps depicted heaven as less a place to greet God than to be reunited with loved ones. It rejected the traditional Calvinist view of Heaven. The controversy only stimulated sales, and within a few weeks after its release, her publisher sent her a payment for $600 (about $9,808 in today's dollars) and a note, “Your book is moving grandly. It has already reached a sale of 4,000 copies.”

Over 100,000 copies were sold in the United States and England and it was translated and reprinted at least four other languages.[4][6]

She received thousands of letters in response to the first book. She wrote two more books on the same topic, Between the Gates and Beyond the Gates. She then wrote a novella about animal rights titled Loveliness. Phelps said she wrote The Gates Ajar to comfort a generation of women who were devastated by the losses of their loved ones following the Civil War and who found no comfort in traditional religion. Phelps' vision of heaven made the book a run-away best seller. She later built on the success of the first Gates book with a series of other books that featured the word "Gates" in their titles and which continued to reinforce her views of the afterlife as a place with gardens, comfortable front porches, and finely built houses.

The Gates Ajar inspired works by other authors in the following decades, such as Mark Twain's parody "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" and Louis H. Pendleton's Wedding Garment: A Tale of the Afterlife. The final novel in the Gates series was also adapted into a stage play in 1901 titled Within the Gates.[7]

While writing these and other popular stories, she became an advocate through her lectures and other work for social reform, temperance, and the women's emancipation. She was also involved in clothing reform for women, and in 1874 urged them to burn their corsets.[2]

Burn up the corsets! ... No, nor do you save the whalebones, you will never need whalebones again. Make a bonfire of the cruel steels that have lorded it over your thorax and abdomens for so many years and heave a sigh of relief, for your emancipation I assure you, from this moment has begun.[8]

A key influence on her writings on women's rights, especially her beliefs regarding marriage, were the works of John Stuart Mill, such as Mill's 1869 essay The Subjection of Women.[7] Though Phelps was an avid writer on reform issues, she was not actively involved with women's rights organizations or other reform groups of the time. The progressive deterioration of her health from the 1870s onward kept her contributions mostly literary in nature rather than public.[7]

In 1877 she published a novel, The Story of Avis, that was ahead of its time. The work focuses on many of the early feminist issues of her era. In it she portrayed a woman's struggle to balance her married life and associated domestic responsibilities with her passion to become a painter.[2] The protagonist is an independent, extraordinary woman in her time who initially decides her goals will not be constrained by marriage and financial dependence on a husband, although she eventually ends up marrying anyhow.[4] She may have been reflecting her mother's life when she described the impossibility of pursuing both her artistic ambitions and adhering to her domestic responsibilities.[4] Elizabeth's novel was largely influenced by Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh.[2] Phelps's unfavorable depiction of men's and women's roles in marriage was controversial.[4]

In 1876 Phelps became the first woman to present a lecture series at Boston University. Her presentations were titled "Representative Modern Fiction"[4] and they analyzed the works of George Eliot.[9]

Social advocacy was also incorporated in Phelp's various children's literature publications as she did not attempt to conceal the inequities of the era's class structure. In stories such as "Bobbit's Hotel", "One Way to Get An Education", and "Mary Elizabeth", Phelps directly illustrates the impact of poverty on children. In "Bobbit's Hotel", the title character dies in an effort to shelter two young orphans. "Mary Elizabeth" depicts a young homeless girl's choices between theft and begging as a means of survival. "One Way to Get An Education" depicts a child laborer's desire for a better life than mill work and subsequent decision to self-injure in order to attain an education.[10]

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and her husband co-authored two Biblical romances in 1890 and 1891. Her autobiography, Chapters from a Life was published in 1896 after being serialized in McClure's. She also wrote a large number of essays for Harper's Magazine.[2]

Phelps continued to write short stories and novels into the twentieth century. Her novel Trixy (1904) focused on antivivisection,[11] a cause she supported later in life. Writer, feminist, and animal rights advocate Carol J. Adams describes the novel as "important and timely."[11] Her last work, Comrades (1911) was published posthumously. Phelps died January 28, 1911, in Newton Center, Massachusetts.[12]

• Come Forth (1891)
• A Lost Hero (1890)
• The Master of the Magicians (1890)