Elizabeth Stuart Phelps was once a tremendously famous writer who was compared to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Louisa May Alcott and George Eliot by some of her most important contemporaries such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thomas Wentworth Higginson and John Greenleaf Whittier. Much of her success was owing to her best-seller The Gates Ajar (1868), a novel that sold 80,000 copies in America, nearly 100,000 in England, was reprinted many times, and was translated into several languages, including Italian, French, German, and Dutch. This literary work has more recently been simply considered as a religious —although innovative and challenging the strict orthodoxy that surrounded Phelps— novel of the afterlife. Simplification has also characterised the criticism that the rest of her writings has received: appropriate analysis reveals not only the craft of...
1916 words
Citation: Narbona Carrión, María Dolores. "Elizabeth Stuart Phelps". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 September 2007 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3546, accessed 13 December 2025.]
