Mary finds that "the house feels like a prison" and the telegram words-"'shot dead'-shut up and walled in, as. To losses from the ensuing Civil War, Phelps then responded with The Gates Ajar, which she cast in the first-person diary entries of orphaned twenty-four-year-old Mary Cabot, who had just lost her brother Roy in the war.
The daughter also followed the domestic sentimentalism (a literary mode evoking sympathy) of her Andover, Massachusetts, neighbor Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom's Cabin or, Life among the Lowly (1852) engaged more than 100,000 readers in less than a half year with its heart-rending portrayal of mothers black and white aching from the loss of their children through slavery or death, thereby pleading for mothers everywhere. Phelps drew upon the domestic regional realism of her mother, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, whose The Sunny Side or, The Country Minister's Wife (1851), in its depiction of an unending round of household duties, reflected the lives of many of its 100,000 first-year readers. Instead of an orthodox abstract heaven, she sought in The Gates Ajar to console bereaved Civil War women through her message that their lost loved ones remained spiritually close and readers might expect to rejoin them in a domestic afterlife. On the book's title page Phelps quoted the nineteenth-century Swiss novelist and memoirist Madame de Gasparin: "Splendor! Immensity! Eternity! Grand words! Great things! A little definite happiness would be more to the purpose." Phelps provided a means to achieve such "happiness" in her book. Many dead bodies were never buried hence the bereaved lacked the comforting closure of end-of-life ceremonies. A catastrophic 623,000 soldiers died while 500,000 were wounded and some 30,000 received amputations. The book met an urgent need for hope and consolation of bereaved people everywhere but especially in the United States, where women mourned the loss of their beloved husbands, fathers, brothers, friends, and lovers in the recent and most bloody Civil War (1861–1865).
The Gates Ajar gained entrepreneurial recognition, too, as mourning apparel (such as collars and tippets), cigars, songs, patent medicines, and floral funeral arrangements were named after it, according to Phelps in her autobiography Chapters from a Life (1896). The novel was later translated into French, German, Dutch, and Italian. Nearly 100,000 people had read it in the United States by 1900, and even more in Britain. Few today may have heard of either the novel The Gates Ajar (1868) or its author Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911), though it was a best-seller in its time.
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