Chapters from a Life.
Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart. Chapters from a Life. Illustrated. Boston and NY: Houghton, Mifflin, 1897.
8vo.; illustrated; green cloth stamped in gilt; extremities frayed.
First edition of Phelps’s memoir. The ad on the verso of the first blank reveals Phelps’s contemporary popularity; in 1897, The Gates Ajar was in its 81st thousand, its sequel, Beyond the Gates, in its 30th thousand, and over two dozen other titles were in print.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844-1911), born Mary Gray Phelps, adopted the full name of her mother—described by Beatrice K. Hofstadter as “a popular writer of didactic fiction”—after her death when Mary, her eldest child, was eight years old. She published her first story at the age of 13, in the Youth’s Companion, and followed this with appearances in Sunday school readers. By the time she was 16, Phelps was certain that she, too, would become a writer—in fact, she published her first adult story at the age of 20, in Harper’s, and began her first and most successful book, The Gates Ajar, which came out four years later. A “barely fictionalized argument that heaven will contain all that is loveliest and best on earth,” The Gates Ajar was a best-seller in the United States and England as well, and was translated into at least four languages. “Although it was attacked both as bad literature and as heretical theology, Elizabeth Phelps was gratified, like many another popular author, by a deluge of letters from grateful readers thanking her for the comfort she gave them.” Phelps followed The Gates Ajar with two sequels, each slightly less popular than the one before, and with several dozen other novels, while publishing poetry in journals and magazines. “However vaporish and overwrought her work often was,” Hofstadter notes, “Phelps always practiced these precepts: her subjects were contemporary, her heroines were simple New England girls, and her plots followed the course of ordinary events.” (NAW, p. 540) Late in her career Phelps married Herbert Dickinson Ward, almost twenty years her junior, and collaborated with him on three Biblical romances.
Phelps promoted women’s causes in several of her novels. Her second novel, Hedged In (1870), examined the lives of factory girls and “fallen women.” The Story of Avis (1877) and Doctor Zay (1882) picture the difficulties encountered by working wives and mothers. A Singular Life, reportedly Phelps’s favorite, tackles the temperance issue. These novels supplemented Phelps’s regularly published articles addressing such topics, which also included dress reform, suffrage, employment, and, in another vein, anti-vivisection.
(#3869)
Print Inquire
