SOURCE: “The Heavenly Utopia of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps,” in Women and Utopia: Critical Interpretations, edited by Marleen Barr and Nicholas D. Smith, University Press of America, 1983, pp. 65-95.

In the following essay, Kessler suggests that Phelps creates an ambivalent utopia in her novels dealing with the afterlife.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, for those not familiar with her, lived from 1844 to 1911. She was raised in Andover, Massachusetts, where her father taught at Andover Theological Seminary, an institution founded in 1807 to maintain a conservative trinitarian theology against Harvard's unitarian innovation. Phelps's mother, also an author, died when her daughter was eight years old. The latter assumed her mother's name sometime between eight and twelve years.

Between 1868 and 1887, Phelps published three fantasies depicting a heavenly afterlife.¹ Many have considered these purely consolatory in type, but I should like to stress their utopian function.² Of course a distinct problem arises when a writer...