“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.”
– Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
Born in Massachusetts on this date
in 1844, Phelps was the daughter of one of the nation’s leading theologians,
the Rev. Dr. Austin Phelps, and the writer Elizabeth Wooster Stuart Phelps,
author of a series of books for girls called The Kitty Brown stories.
Rev. Phelps also was a noted writer, his works
becoming standard textbooks for Christian theological education and still in
print today.
The younger Elizabeth
had a storytelling gift even as a child and by age 13 had had stories published
in Youth's Companion and many Sunday school publications. Prominent
literary figures like John Greenleaf Whittier lauded her early writings which
put her on the path to author a remarkable 57 volumes of fiction, poetry and
essays in her lifetime.
Her most popular
novel, The Gates Ajar – her vision of
what Heaven might be like and published right after the Civil War – was a
runaway bestseller and established her as a leading writer and a well-known
speaker advocating for social reform and women’s rights. Her
1877 book, The Story of Avis, was way ahead of its time, focusing
on issues that would be among the leading feminist causes at the end of the 19th
and beginning of the 20th centuries.
“Happiness must be cultivated,” she advised shortly before her death in 1911. “It is like character. It is not a thing to be safely let alone for a moment, or it will run to weeds.”
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