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The Madonna of the Tubs. ... With ... Illustrations by R. Turner and G. H. Clements.
(Mark Twain once famously said "there was but one solitary...)
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(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
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("A Singular Life" is a novel published in 1895 by Elizabe...)
"A Singular Life" is a novel published in 1895 by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward. It was the fourth highest best-selling book in the United States in 1896. The book was published in a period when Americans were exploring how the teachings of Jesus Christ could be applied to daily life. Several books considering the question were published in 1890s. A Singular Life, in this vein, features a protagonist named Emanuel Bayard who pursues Jesus-inspired humanitarianism by forsaking ties to his orthodox church. Among Bayard's projects is positively influencing a prostitute named Magdalena (or "Lena") to become more respectable and use her talent for singing for a better purpose. When he suggests she pursue a new career, specifically household service, she balks and refuses the stereotypical domestic role and instead works for a gunpowder factory.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward (1844–1911) was an early feminist American author and intellectual who challenged traditional Christian beliefs of the afterlife, challenged women's traditional roles in marriage and family, and advocated clothing reform for women.
(Christian ingenuity, with much remarkable success, in ame...)
Christian ingenuity, with much remarkable success, in ameliorating the condition of factory operatives, and in blunting the edge of those misapprehensions and disaffections which exist between capital and labor, between employer and employed, between ease and toil, between millions and mills, the world over. Had Christian ingenuity been generally synonymous with the conduct of manufacturing corporations, I should have found no occasion for the writing of this book. I believe that a wide-spread ignorance exists among us regarding the abuses of our factory system, more especially, but not exclusively, as exhibited in many of the country mills.
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Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward was an early feminist American author and intellectual.
Background
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward was born in Boston, Massachussets, the eldest child of Elizabeth (Stuart) and Austin Phelps and the descendant of Nathaniel Phelps who emigrated from England with his father in 1630 and died in Northampton, Massachussets She was baptized as Mary Gray, but after her mother's death she changed her name. Her father was the son of a Congregational minister whose eminently orthodox career was interrupted by a remarkable case of "house possession, " in consequence of which for about seven months strange phenomena were manifested in his parsonage. Turnips thumping from the ceiling to the study table were among the crasser forms. A man of complete veracity, he wrote a record of this peculiar experience; but many years later the manuscript was destroyed by his grandchildren, for reasons now difficult to appreciate. Of the actuality of the manifestations, it should be added, they had no doubts; nor did they offer any explanation. This event in the Phelps family cannot be overlooked; it can hardly be overemphasized in dealing with the work of the granddaughter, always interested in psychic phenomena. In 1848 Austin Phelps accepted a professorship at the Theological Seminary at Andover, the youthful home of his wife, the fifth child of Moses Stuart, one of the most redoubtable theologians that even New England has produced.
Career
With all the prestige of the most scholarly academic background, with a brilliant mind, nervous temperament, intense susceptibility to artistic and spiritual impressions, Elizabeth (Stuart) Phelps was attuned to exquisite pleasure and exquisite pain. Under the name of "H. Trusta" she published extraordinarily popular religious tales, written in an easy, natural style, lightened by many glints of humor. A Peep at Number Five (1851) is a really charming record of a clergyman's home. The Sunny Side (1851) reached the astonishing circulation of some 100, 000 copies. The Angel Over the Right Shoulder (1851), under the thinnest veil of fiction, shows "the difficult reconciliation between genius and domestic life". "The struggle killed her, but she fought till she fell, " her daughter recorded years later. It was over when that daughter was eight years old, but one of the strongest influences in her life was the memory of her mother; and many of her own tales, especially The Story of Avis (1877), deal with similar struggles. The death of their gifted mother left the care of three small children to their father, already beginning the nervous invalidism that tortured the remainder of his life. Of his devotion to his children, of his ideal fatherhood, of the atmosphere of his home his daughter wrote glowingly in Austin Phelps (1891) and Chapters from a Life (1896). It was he who influenced her reading, cultivating a taste severe and catholic; it was from him that she received her real education, although she was a day pupil at schools in Andover, where she had sound training in mathematics and sciences, as well as in languages and literatures. Philosophy and theology were inevitable elements in the very fiber of one bred on Andover Hill. In Chapters from a Life she wrote some pages about the Andover of her youth that deserve to rank among American classics. Although a resident of the academic center of New England theology and the daughter of one of its most fervent exponents, she was trained in a religion of love and hope, "natural, easy, pleasant. " "The fear of an ungodlike God never haunted us, " she wrote; "in Creeds we were not over-much instructed". That the religion thus early acquired was satisfying and sustaining her whole later life testified. Although a motherless and often a lonely child, she seems to have grown through a normal girlhood, enlivened by the usual social and intellectual pleasures, plus a superfluity of young men, mostly of the class known as "theologues, " whom in her fiction she alternately pitied and patronized, but rarely escaped. Crashing into all normal life, destroying its balance and its beauty, came the Civil War; and to her it brought personal tragedy. The shock caused by the death of the boy whom she loved proved almost too much for her physical and mental poise, and for several years she was very nearly a recluse. From the grief of that period and the long brooding emerged The Gates Ajar, begun in 1864 and published in 1868 (but title page dated 1869). From childhood she had written, and at thirteen she had begun to publish; now she concentrated the technique and facility thus acquired to "comfort some few of the women whose misery crowded the land". The result was amazing to the author, as, for different reasons, it is to readers today. In a tale almost devoid of incident, by means of conversations loaded with Biblical quotations and their literal interpretations, this orthodox daughter of an ultra-orthodox theological professor swept away the then current conceptions of heaven, substituting a place of light and love, where the dear dead retained their familiar characteristics and all the things that they had loved worthily here. It reads strangely now, because of its subject and its method; but it brought solace to many thousands and became one of the most influential works of fiction ever written by an American. The circulation in this country fell somewhat below 100, 000 but was greater in England; and the book was translated into many European languages. Its success made the author "the most astonished girl in North America, " she wrote; she received letters from all over the world; she was extolled, and she was vituperated. Incredible it all seems now; nevertheless it is true. That the time had come for some such revolution in thought in no way detracts from the originality and daring of the author. One result is easily understood. Thereafter whatever she wrote was published and read; but the overwhelming success was never repeated. She wrote better books, but none that touched the popular imagination so vividly or met the popular need so directly. In Beyond the Gates (1883), The Gates Between (1887), Within the Gates (1901), and in several short stories she again attempted eschatology. Both by inheritance and by temperament she was attuned to the psychic; but her deep spiritual reverence, her Yankee common sense, probably also her keen humor kept her from swinging far from her moorings in orthodox religion. She wrote voluminously, mainly fiction; also she essayed verse, Poetic Studies (1875), Songs of the Silent World (1884, but title page dated 1885), but never with the success of prose. As few but the greatest have done she understood and expressed the sufferings of gifted and sensitive women, the depths of loneliness, the torture of jangled nerves. This last experience was hers by birthright. Like her father she was a victim of insomnia in some of its most excruciating forms. These nervous disorders made her at times almost a recluse and deprived her of many coveted forms of service. While still young she had written one of her most intense tales, "The Tenth of January, " in the Atlantic Monthly (March 1868), dealing with the collapse of a factory building. The Silent Partner (1871) and many short stories testify to her sympathy with the narrow lives of women in industry. Doctor Zay (1882) is one of the first American novels to deal with women in medicine. Indeed the problem of the adjustment of women to the complications of modern life was never far from her thought. It reached its highest expression in The Story of Avis (ante), "a woman's book, hoping for small hospitality at the hands of men". For many years her summer home was at East Gloucester, Massachussets, and here she came to know the pathos and the tragedy of the fisher folk. Here too were seared upon her imagination the horrors of intemperance. For three years she was connected with a mission for temperance reform, and in it she had experiences she counted among the richest in her life. The relinquishment of this work on account of illness was to her a great trial; but she passed on her sympathetic understanding of her neighbors in two tales that rank high in American fiction, The Madonna of the Tubs (1886) and Jack, the Fisherman (1887). Gloucester also furnished the background for A Singular Life (1894), although the first chapters deal with Andover and its theological seminary. Andover repudiated her interpretation of its theology, and Gloucester resented her treatment of its morals; but the reading public of New England took the book to its heart as it had done none of hers since The Gates Ajar. It is an impassioned, utterly sincere plea for practical religion in the story of a young minister who tried to live like a "Christ-man" in a liquor-drenched town, among hard-working people. The dominant motive in this book is the dominant motive in all the best of her writing, as it was in her life. Outgrowing much of her early creed, losing interest in theology, she centered her thought on the central figure of Christianity and found solution for life's problems in the teaching and example of Jesus Christ. As a result of lifelong familiarity with the Gospels she wrote The Story of Jesus Christ: an Interpretation (1897). Into this she put her whole heart, but she had neither the critical acumen nor the scholarship to treat the great subject in an original manner. She valued the book far more highly than did even her most admiring readers. At her new home in Newton Center, Massachussets, she wrote several books in collaboration. In The Master of the Magicians (1890) and Come Forth (1890, but title page dated 1891) they worked on Biblical romances, but without marked success. Throughout the remainder of her life she continued to write prolifically. Austin Phelps (ante), the biography of her father, and Chapters from a Life (ante), which she refused to term an autobiography, are especially delightful: indeed they may be considered essential for the understanding of academic New England and its intellectual aristocracy.
Achievements
She challenged traditional Christian beliefs of the afterlife, challenged women's traditional roles in marriage and family, and advocated clothing reform for women.
(This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)
book
Views
Quotations:
"I believe in women; and in their right to their own best possibilities in every department of life. I believe that the methods ofdress practiced among women are a marked hindrance to the realization of these possibilities, and should be scorned or persuaded out of society. "
"It seems to me that life is always undoing for us something that we have just laboriously done. "
"The great law of denial belongs to the powerful forces of life, whether the case be one of coolish baked beans, or an unrequited affection. "
"It is not in our drawing-rooms that we should look to judge of the intrinsic worth of any style of dress. The street-car is a truer crucible of its inherent value. "
"A good short story is a work of art which daunts us in proportion to its brevity. .. . No inspiration is too noble for it; no amountof hard work is too severe for it. "
"Surely it is one of the requisites of a tasteful garb that the expression of effort to please shall be wanting in it; that the mysteries of the toilet shall not be suggested by it; that the steps to its completion shall be knocked away like the sculptor's ladder from the statue, and the mental force expended upon it be swept away out of sight like the chips on the studio floor. "
Personality
It was hardly possible that so intense a personality as hers should be at all times balanced and tolerant. Frequently in both her style and her treatment one is aware of the excess to which the nervous temperament is prone. Often even her best writing is marred by redundance and exaggeration; but that she was a master of lucid, fluent, poignant English there is no doubt. "Provincial" is a word easy to apply to her, hard to defend. It is true that she usually wrote about the intellectual, oversensitive people of New England; but also it is true that she saw them as human beings, occasionally had glimpses of their naked souls, perceived for herself and helped her reader to perceive the tragedy and the glory of the will to do "the painful right. "
Connections
She was married to Herbert Dickinson Ward on October 20, 1888. They had no children.
