Elizabeth Wooster Stuart Phelps
| Elizabeth Stuart Phelps | |
|---|---|
| Born | Elizabeth Wooster Stuart August 13, 1815 Andover, Massachusetts, United States |
| Died | November 30, 1852 (aged 37) Andover, Massachusetts, United States |
| Pen name | H. Trusta |
| Spouse | Austin Phelps |
| Children | Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, Moses Stuart, Amos Lawrence |
Elizabeth Wooster Stuart Phelps (1815–1852) was an American writer of religiously themed articles, adult domestic fiction and books for children. She wrote eleven books as well as numerous articles and stories that were translated and published in many languages, and probably many more works that appeared anonymously. Phelps wrote "at the beginning of the transition in American women's writing from domestic sentimentality to regional realism" and was "among the earliest depicters of the New England scene, antedating the regional novels of her Andover neighbor, Harriet Beecher Stowe". In addition to being one of the earliest known authors to have penned a fiction series specifically for girls, her writing also focused on the burdens on women in their restrictive roles as mothers and wives. Her much anthologized 1852 semi-autobiographical short story, "The Angel Over the Right Shoulder", illustrates the repressive burdens frustrating a wife's creative ambitions and need to "cultivate her own mind and heart". The story is notable as "one of the rare woman's fictions of this time to recognize the phenomenon of domestic schizophrenia", says literary critic Nina Baym.
Her only daughter and eldest child, the writer Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, noted that her creative and talented mother was "torn" by an internal "civil war" between a woman's calling as caretaker of others and as a creative artist and thinker in her own right. "The struggle killed her", reflected Ward, "but she fought till she fell."
Phelps was born in Andover, Massachusetts on August 13, 1815, to Moses Stuart and Abigail (Clark) Stuart. Her father was a prominent professor of Sacred Literature at Andover Theological Seminary where he is credited with pioneering modern biblical study in America. He was an anti-abolitionist Christian and he wrote an influential scriptural justification for slavery and for the deportation of black people to Africa in the 1850 pamphlet "Conscience and the Constitution". On her mother's side, the family tree led back to John Winthrop, the English Puritan lawyer and Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. She was also childhood friends with author Harriette Newell Woods Baker, also born in Andover, with whom she started a writing society to read each other's work.
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