first edition
1852 · Andover
by Phelps, Elizabeth Wooster Stuart
Andover: Warren P. Draper, 1852. First edition. Octavo. Publisher’s red cloth with gilt stamp of an angel. 29 pp. Engraved frontispiece. Contemporary pencil ownership signature to upper pastedown. Expertly rebacked with original spine laid down. A Very Good copy of a scarce work exploring the mental health of a young New England housewife.
In Woman's Fiction, Nina Baym writes that the present work is “about a young housewife’s [Mrs. James'] conflict between domestic duties and the wish to develop herself as an individual…She longs for study, intellectual stimulation, a more earnest life; her round of days absorbed in one petty household crisis after another seems frivolous and useless. With her husband’s well-intentioned support, she sets aside an hour a day for private study. But no one in her home respects the hour—in fact her husband, needing a button sewed on, is the first to violate it. In the end, she is reconciled to what appears to be the inevitable by a dream-vision that shows her the dignity and value of service to her family. Compared to the significance of her wifely and motherly duties, self-development is frivolous and superficial. Although Angel rapidly retreats from the issue it has broached, it is one of the rare woman’s fictions of this time to recognize the phenomenon of domestic schizophrenia.”
The Angel Over the Right Shoulder is a semi-autobiographical reflection by Elizabeth Wooster Stuart Phelps (1815 – 1852), who drew on her own experiences of domestic stress, creative frustration, and desire for personal fulfillment. Like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), Angel focuses on the declining mental health of a young mother and her fight against the constraints placed on her body and mind (notably, both authors were diagnosed with psychiatric conditions that they expressed in their respective stories). Phelps' daughter, the spiritualist, writer, and dress reformer Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward (1844 – 1911), recounted in her 1896 memoir that Phelps' duties as a mother and wife often complicated her status as a popular author: Ward described her mother "crooning to a sick child while the MS. lies unprinted on the table" and speculated that her publishers must have "wish[ed] their professor's wife was a free woman, childless and solitary, able to send copy as fast as it is wanted" (Chapters From a Life, pp. 14-15). Ward concludes that "the struggle killed her, but she fought till she fell."
Both the personal nature of the story and the depth of Phelps' feeling is readily apparent in Angel. In a moment of reflection while observing her daughter sleep, the protagonist, Mrs. James, muses, "...soon grave thoughts entered her mind, and these deepened into sad ones. She thought of her disappointment and the failure of her plans. To her, not only the past month but the whole past year, seemed to have been one of fruitless effort...She had accomplished nothing, that she could see, but to keep her house and family in order, and even this, to her saddened mind, seemed to have been but indifferently done. She was conscious of yearnings for a more earnest life than this...and yet the causes of these feelings seemed to lie in a dim and misty region, which her eye could not penetrate" (pp. 20-21).
Phelps was the daughter of Moses Stuart, a Congregational minister who taught at the Andover Theological Seminary. As a teenager, Phelps attended Abbott Academy (then the Abbott Female Seminary), one of the first young women's secondary schools in the country. She later attended the Mount Vernon School in Boston, where she studied under the direction of Reverend Jacob Abbott; Phelps eventually began writing stories for Abbott's Christian periodical under the pseudonym “H. Trusta.” After marrying a minister, Phelps returned to Andover in 1848, where her husband also found employment at the Andover Theological Seminary. Phelps' most popular works were the bestselling novel The Sunny Side (1851), which features a minister’s wife that Baym describes as “perhaps…an early example of the ‘two-career woman,’ the full-time housekeeper and full-time minister’s assistant.”
Baym, Woman’s Fiction, pp. 247-8. Wright II, 1883. (Inventory #: 7274)
In Woman's Fiction, Nina Baym writes that the present work is “about a young housewife’s [Mrs. James'] conflict between domestic duties and the wish to develop herself as an individual…She longs for study, intellectual stimulation, a more earnest life; her round of days absorbed in one petty household crisis after another seems frivolous and useless. With her husband’s well-intentioned support, she sets aside an hour a day for private study. But no one in her home respects the hour—in fact her husband, needing a button sewed on, is the first to violate it. In the end, she is reconciled to what appears to be the inevitable by a dream-vision that shows her the dignity and value of service to her family. Compared to the significance of her wifely and motherly duties, self-development is frivolous and superficial. Although Angel rapidly retreats from the issue it has broached, it is one of the rare woman’s fictions of this time to recognize the phenomenon of domestic schizophrenia.”
The Angel Over the Right Shoulder is a semi-autobiographical reflection by Elizabeth Wooster Stuart Phelps (1815 – 1852), who drew on her own experiences of domestic stress, creative frustration, and desire for personal fulfillment. Like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), Angel focuses on the declining mental health of a young mother and her fight against the constraints placed on her body and mind (notably, both authors were diagnosed with psychiatric conditions that they expressed in their respective stories). Phelps' daughter, the spiritualist, writer, and dress reformer Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward (1844 – 1911), recounted in her 1896 memoir that Phelps' duties as a mother and wife often complicated her status as a popular author: Ward described her mother "crooning to a sick child while the MS. lies unprinted on the table" and speculated that her publishers must have "wish[ed] their professor's wife was a free woman, childless and solitary, able to send copy as fast as it is wanted" (Chapters From a Life, pp. 14-15). Ward concludes that "the struggle killed her, but she fought till she fell."
Both the personal nature of the story and the depth of Phelps' feeling is readily apparent in Angel. In a moment of reflection while observing her daughter sleep, the protagonist, Mrs. James, muses, "...soon grave thoughts entered her mind, and these deepened into sad ones. She thought of her disappointment and the failure of her plans. To her, not only the past month but the whole past year, seemed to have been one of fruitless effort...She had accomplished nothing, that she could see, but to keep her house and family in order, and even this, to her saddened mind, seemed to have been but indifferently done. She was conscious of yearnings for a more earnest life than this...and yet the causes of these feelings seemed to lie in a dim and misty region, which her eye could not penetrate" (pp. 20-21).
Phelps was the daughter of Moses Stuart, a Congregational minister who taught at the Andover Theological Seminary. As a teenager, Phelps attended Abbott Academy (then the Abbott Female Seminary), one of the first young women's secondary schools in the country. She later attended the Mount Vernon School in Boston, where she studied under the direction of Reverend Jacob Abbott; Phelps eventually began writing stories for Abbott's Christian periodical under the pseudonym “H. Trusta.” After marrying a minister, Phelps returned to Andover in 1848, where her husband also found employment at the Andover Theological Seminary. Phelps' most popular works were the bestselling novel The Sunny Side (1851), which features a minister’s wife that Baym describes as “perhaps…an early example of the ‘two-career woman,’ the full-time housekeeper and full-time minister’s assistant.”
Baym, Woman’s Fiction, pp. 247-8. Wright II, 1883. (Inventory #: 7274)
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