From the Periodical Archives: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, "The Rejected Manuscript"

Abstract

following story, reprinted from the Jan uary 1893 issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine, was written by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward late in her career. It was included in Empty House and Other Stories (1910), Phelps's last collection of stories, but it has not been reprinted since then.1 As a story, it fore grounds many of the issues at the heart of nineteenth-century period ical production: the interplay between popular readership and authorial genius; the importance of informal and personal patronage networks that accompanied the increasingly mass production of mag azines; the economic constraints faced by both editors and contribu tors; and the tension between the de-centered or polyvocal contents of magazines and the real-life needs of the individuals who produce them. At the same time, The Rejected Manuscript tells us a great deal about the career of Phelps herself, and, by extension, of the par ticular challenges faced by female magazine contributors. By 1893, Phelps was already a well-established author who had published thirty-nine books.2 Despite this large body of work, however, she was?like her protagonist Mary Hathorne?known largely as a book author. (Hathorne's name is itself an allusion to another fa mous author known primarily for one book, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who as a young man added the w to his ancestral name.) In Phelps's case, the book was Gates Ajar (1868): a best-selling spiritualist novel of the Reconstruction period that eventually led to two sequels, Beyond the Gates (1883) and Gates Between (1887). If Phelps was best known for her consolatory vision of Heaven, how ever, her fiction also explored a wide range of social issues, including the plight of the working class (in Hedged In [1870] and Silent Partner [1871]), women's rights (in Story of Avis [1877]), and tem perance (in A Singular Life [1895]). These later books did not garner