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…

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 19 March 2024.]

3546 Elizabeth Stuart Phelps 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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