Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's career exemplifies the range of interests and achievements of nineteenth-century women writers. An acknowledged voice for woman's rights, antivivisection, and temperance causes, she wrote more than a hundred and fifty stories, twenty novels for adults, children's books, poetry, plays, an autobiography, biographies of her father and of Jesus Christ, and essays on every imaginable subject, from the afterlife and homeopathy to women's names and dress. Phelps was both popular and acclaimed in her day; yet since then she was virtually unread until the recent revival of work by women writers. Her novel The Gates Ajar (1869 [i.e., 1868]) made her internationally famous and controversial at the age of twenty-four."The Tenth of January" (Atlantic Monthly, March 1868), her story of the collapse of the Pemberton Mills, brought her recognition from such luminaries as John Greenleaf Whittier and Thomas Wentworth Higginson , who later praised her as having "more...