She is gradually being rediscovered for such novels as
The Story of Avis (1877) and
The Silent Partner (1871), valued for her ardent investigations, in fiction and prose of the unarticulated lives of the industrial poor, of the elderly, and of women.
Phelps was part, as James T. Fields joked, "of a family of large circulations." Born Mary Gray Phelps, she was the child of two successful writers: clergyman and later Andover professor of theology Austin Phelps, author of books on rhetoric and religion, and popular writer Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, author of The Sunny Side (1851) and "Angel over the Right Shoulder" (1852). In Chapters from a Life (1896) Phelps wrote that it was "impossible to be their daughter and not to have something to say, and a pen to say it." After her mother died from childbirth and "cerbral disease" when Phelps was eight, Phelps took, or was given, her mother's name and described herself as "proud to wear" it. She also shared her mother's belief that "it was as natural for her daughter to write as to breathe." She grew up in the intensely intellectual atmosphere of Andover, Massachusetts, which she described as "a heavily masculine place ...
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