author
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
1844–1911
A bestselling 19th-century American writer, she brought big spiritual questions and women’s everyday struggles into popular fiction. Her work mixed emotion, social criticism, and a quietly radical view of what women’s lives could be.
16 Audiobooks
The Gates Ajar
by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
Gypsy Breynton
by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
Gypsy's Cousin Joy
by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
Avery
by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
The Whole Family: a Novel by Twelve Authors
by William Dean Howells, Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews, John Kendrick Bangs, Alice Brown, Mary Stewart Cutting, Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman, Henry James, Elizabeth Garver Jordan, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Henry Van Dyke, Mary Heaton Vorse, Edith Wyatt
A Lost Hero
by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Herbert D. (Herbert Dickinson) Ward
The Gates Between
by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
A Chariot of Fire
by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
Loveliness: A Story
by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
Men, Women, and Ghosts
by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
A Singular Life
by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
Comrades
by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
Beyond the Gates
by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
Within the Gates
by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
Songs of the Silent World, and Other Poems
by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
The Supply at Saint Agatha's
by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
About the author
Born Mary Gray Phelps in Boston in 1844, she later took the name Elizabeth Stuart Phelps in memory of her mother, a writer who died when she was young. She grew up in a deeply religious New England family and became one of the most widely read American authors of her era.
Phelps won early fame with The Gates Ajar (1868), a novel that offered readers a more intimate and comforting vision of the afterlife after the Civil War. She went on to write fiction, poetry, essays, and stories that often questioned strict religious ideas and explored women’s work, marriage, independence, and social reform.
She later married writer Herbert Dickinson Ward and is often listed as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward. Today she is remembered as an early feminist voice in American literature, admired for combining popular storytelling with serious moral and social concerns.