ABSTRACT
Scholars know that Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Gates Ajar (1868) sold more copies in Great Britain than in the United States, but this is the first analysis of what that novel and Phelps’s more politically demanding works, Hedged In (1870) and The Silent Partner (1871), meant to British audiences. Editors and reviewers were shocked and fascinated by Phelps’s feminist agitation. The chapter considers reviews in spiritualist periodicals as well as feminist and conservative religious outlets. The results suggest that Phelps’s varied output about everything from heaven to manufacturing was received as one interconnected feminist corpus.
