The Gates Ajar

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Published in 1868, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s fictional narrative of a young girl’s diary, a record of the loss and recovery of religious faith, excited a sympathetic response in hundreds of thousands of readers. In sharp contrast to rigid Calvinist doctrine, the novel offered a simple and undemanding faith and pictured a personal immortality in a heaven as comfortable and tangible as a nineteenth-century New England village. In an informative introduction, Smith places the author in the perspective of her environment and examines the role of this novel in American cultural history.