Her mother was the eldest daughter of Moses Stuart, the well-known professor of Sacred Literature at Andover Theological Seminary.

He was pastor of the Pine Street Congregational Church until 1848, when he accepted a position as the Chair of Rhetoric at Andover Theological Seminary.

[4] Phelps received an upper class education, attending the Abbot Academy and Mrs. Edwards' School for Young Ladies.

One source noted, "She spun amazing yarns for the children she played with... and her schoolmates of the time a little farther on talk with vivid interest of the stories she used to improvise for their entertainment.

In most of her writings she used her mother's name "Elizabeth Stuart Phelps" as a pseudonym, both before and after her marriage in 1888 to Herbert Dickinson Ward, a journalist seventeen years younger.

[1] She gained recognition early in life from prominent literary figures including Thomas Wentworth Higginson and John Greenleaf Whittier.

The grief-stricken girl becomes convinced that she and her brother will be reunited in an afterlife[4] in which people retain their physical shapes and personalities.

[2] The book became very popular, in part from its positive portrayal of death shortly after the Civil War, during which more than 400,000 individuals lost their lives.

[2] It also received a great deal of criticism for the way Phelps depicted heaven as less a place to greet God than to be reunited with loved ones.

The controversy only stimulated sales, and within a few weeks after its release, her publisher sent her a payment for $600 (about $11,689 in today's dollars) and a note, “Your book is moving grandly.

[citation needed] The Gates Ajar inspired works by other authors in the following decades, such as Mark Twain's parody "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" (1909) and Louis B. Pendleton's Wedding Garment: A Tale of the Afterlife (1894).

[7] While writing these and other popular stories, she became an advocate through her lectures and other work for social reform, temperance, and women's emancipation.

Make a bonfire of the cruel steels that have lorded it over your thorax and abdomens for so many years and heave a sigh of relief, for your emancipation I assure you, from this moment has begun.

[2] The protagonist is an independent, extraordinary woman in her time who initially decides her goals will not be constrained by marriage and financial dependence on a husband, although she eventually ends up marrying anyhow.

[4] She may have been reflecting her mother's life when she described the impossibility of pursuing both her artistic ambitions and adhering to her domestic responsibilities.

[9] Social advocacy was also incorporated in Phelp's various children's literature publications as she did not attempt to conceal the inequities of the era's class structure.

In stories such as "Bobbit's Hotel", "One Way to Get An Education", and "Mary Elizabeth", Phelps directly illustrates the impact of poverty on children.

"Mary Elizabeth" depicts a young homeless girl's choices between theft and begging as a means of survival.

Writer, feminist, and animal rights advocate Carol J. Adams describes the novel as "important and timely.