Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Beyond the Gates. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1883.
(180 x 125 mm) pp. 196, 16 p. ads. Publisher's green cloth binding with art nouveau style script, gilt butterfly. Internior hinge splitting, wear to endbands, fabric on cover hinge splitting, ends bumped, pages age toned. FAIR to GOOD.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward (1844–1911) was a pioneering American writer who fused spiritualist thought with early feminist critique. Across a prolific career of 57 books, Phelps consistently interrogated women’s confinement to marriage, domesticity, and financial dependence, depicting female physicians, ministers, artists, and intellectuals long before such lives were widely accepted. Her work situates her as a transitional figure: a bridge between 19th-century spiritual consolation literature and modern feminist thought, using sentiment, belief, and reform to argue that women’s souls—and lives—should not be bounded by doctrine or corsetry.