Beyond The Gates eBook

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,...