In most of her writings she used her mother's name "Elizabeth Stuart Phelps" as a pseudonym, both before and after her marriage in 1888 to
Herbert Dickinson Ward, a journalist seventeen years younger. She also used the pseudonym Mary Adams.
Spiritualist novels Ward wrote three
Spiritualist novels. The first,
The Gates Ajar, became her most famous. It took her two years to write. She wrote later that after she spent more than two years revising it, "I could have said it by heart." The book was finally published after the end of the
Civil War. In it, she writes about a girl named Mary Cabot, whose brother was killed during the Civil War. The grief-stricken girl becomes convinced that she and her brother will be reunited in an
afterlife She received thousands of letters in response to the first book. She wrote two more books on the same topic,
Between the Gates and
Beyond the Gates. She then wrote a
novella about
animal rights titled
Loveliness. Phelps said she wrote
The Gates Ajar to comfort a generation of women who were devastated by the losses of their loved ones following the Civil War and who found no comfort in traditional religion. Phelps' vision of heaven made the book a run-away best seller. She later built on the success of the first Gates book with a series of other books that featured the word "Gates" in their titles and which continued to reinforce her views of the afterlife as a place with gardens, comfortable front porches, and finely built houses.
The Gates Ajar inspired works by other authors in the following decades, such as
Mark Twain's parody "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" (1909) and Louis B. Pendleton's
Wedding Garment: A Tale of the Afterlife (1894). The final novel in the
Gates series was also adapted into a stage play in 1901 titled
Within the Gates.
Advocate for social reform While writing these and other popular stories, she became an advocate through her lectures and other work for
social reform,
temperance, and
women's emancipation. She was also involved in
clothing reform for women, and in 1874 urged them to burn their
corsets. Social advocacy was also incorporated in Phelp's various children's literature publications as she did not attempt to conceal the inequities of the era's class structure. In stories such as "Bobbit's Hotel", "One Way to Get An Education", and "Mary Elizabeth", Phelps directly illustrates the impact of poverty on children. In "Bobbit's Hotel", the title character dies in an effort to shelter two young orphans. "Mary Elizabeth" depicts a young homeless girl's choices between theft and begging as a means of survival. "One Way to Get An Education" depicts a child laborer's desire for a better life than mill work and subsequent decision to self-injure in order to attain an education.
Later work Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and her husband co-authored two Biblical romances in 1890 and 1891. Her autobiography,
Chapters from a Life, was published in 1896 after being serialized in
McClure's. She also wrote a large number of essays for
Harper's Magazine. a cause she supported later in life. Writer, feminist, and animal rights advocate
Carol J. Adams describes the novel as "important and timely." == Selected works ==