Three Spiritualist Novels

Author - Elizabeth Phelps ... [Goo?] [Posters]

This Paperback Book item from University of Illinois Press was reviewed on 19-Apr-2009.

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1) Paperback Book Three Spiritualist Novels by University of Illinois Press. ´This volume brings together for the first time three novels that illustrate the distinguished American writer Elizabeth Stuart Phelps´ enduring interest in the afterlife. The daughter of a Calvinist minister, Phelps could not reconcile herself to the idea of a heaven full of spirits who had cut their ties to those left behind on Earth. Rather, she became convinced of the viability of the Spiritualist view that a vital link to earthly life continues in the hereafter.Articulating an alternative to conservative church doctrine, Phelps assured her readers - many of them women bereft of their loved ones by the Civil War - that Spiritualist ideas about the afterlife were not fundamentally at odds with Scripture. Like the protagonist of "The Gates Ajar", these readers wanted to believe ´something actual, something pleasant´ about the world to come, not ´glittering generalities´ about a ´dreadful Heaven´ where their loved ones were too busy singing and worshiping to have any thought of those left behind.All three of the novels collected here - "The Gates Ajar" (1868), "Beyond the Gates" (1883), and "The Gates Between" (1887) - describe heaven as a perfected version of earthly life and the afterlife as a chance to make up for opportunities squandered on Earth. A grieving sister finds consolation in the Spiritualist idea of a continued connection with her beloved brother; a dying woman finds her soul mate in the afterlife; an erring husband makes amends across the line between the living and the dead. Tremendously popular in Phelps´ lifetime, these novels offer a way of reconciling human beings to earthly loss and sorrow, assuring readers of an afterlife both restorative and compensatory. They also provide an intriguing look at a phenomenon that preoccupied nineteenth-century America and continues to fascinate us in the twenty-first century´.¤

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 17-May-2009, 02520690729780252069079, 580-970-070-720-210-130-4X0-370-390-961-251-331-RIB-8

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