“A
great idea is usually original to more than one discoverer. Great ideas come
when the world needs them. Great ideas surround the world's ignorance and press
for admission.” – Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
An early feminist American author
and intellectual, Phelps (born on this date in 1844) was the daughter of a
Congregational minister and writer mother.
She began her own writing as a young girl and was noted for her “gift
for telling stories.” One source noted,
"She spun amazing yarns for the children she played with. And her schoolmates of the time and a little
farther on talk with vivid interest of the stories she used to improvise for
their entertainment.” At age
13, she had a story published in the national reader Youth's Companion,
and from that point through her teens her youth stories appeared in various
national publications.
As an adult, after studying at Abbot
Academy, she continued her writing career and became one of America’s most
popular writers. In addition to her
hundreds of short stories, she penned 57 volumes of fiction, poetry and
essays. In all of these works she
challenged the prevailing view that woman's place and fulfillment resided in
the home. Instead Phelps' work depicted women as succeeding in nontraditional
careers as physicians, ministers, artists and, of course, writers.
She was widely sought after as a
speaker, and in 1876 
she became the first woman to present a lecture series at
Boston University on the topic “Representative Modern Fiction.”
A modest person despite her great
successes and influence, she noted, “It is not the straining for great things
that is most effective; it is the doing the little things, the common duties, a
little better and better.”
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