Even after her marriage to Herbert Dickinson Ward in 1888, Phelps continued to use her adopted name, using her married name solely in private correspondence. Early bibliographers have tended to list her works under the name
Ward, but the facts of her publishing history indicate her preference not to follow this convention of matrimony.
In many ways Phelps's successful career as a writer of more than fifty books and hundreds of magazine stories, essays, and poems was motivated by the early death of her talented mother. Phelps's self-naming was both an act of self-construction and an act of self-denial, embodying the conflicting desires to honor her inheritance while resisting its limitations, as she explored the relationships between mother and child, husband and wife, private desires and public expectations, death and life, and silence and expression. On her death at age sixty-six she left behind a record of the unavoidable internal struggles of a nineteenth-century intellectual woman.
Much of what is known about Phelps's life comes from her autobiography, Chapters from a Life (1896). Phelps was careful to protect the privacy of friends who were still living, however, so she left her reader with a highly selective memoir.
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