Three in February!

29 February 2024: Exceedingly grateful for the extra day thanks to Leap Year that made it possible for me to complete three book entries in February. (Just six more to go!)

Stayed home today and, with the exception of my walk and a brief lunch break (that ended up being an email non-break), worked from 9:00 a.m. until 10:00 p.m. But man, did I get a lot done. Finished my Phelps entry, got documents ready for Monday's Senate meeting, finished my annual report and merit pay application, and graded a bunch of ENGL 102 work. 

Feels good! 

"...life is always undoing for us..."

25 February 2024: Thinking this evening about this passage from The Gates Ajar, spoken by Dr. Bland right before he throws his sermon on his old view of heaven into the fireplace: "It seems to me that life is always undoing for us something that we have just laboriously done” (Phelps 127). It's a small moment in the novel, but seems to me to be profound view about how life helps/forces us to change our beliefs and ideas--and it can be a blessing. 

Also, at 9:19 p.m. on the Sunday of an almost entirely work-filled* weekend, I have just finished my last (I hope?) set of notes for my Phelps entry--and the last item on my weekly "book goals" list. This week: composing, revising, etc.

*One non-work thing: helping Chuck and Bill run the Flagship Trivia tournament today--back at the Clarion for the first time since the pandemic. The other non-work thing: a really lovely Zoom book club meeting earlier this evening. 

Work Cited

Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart. The Gates Ajar. 1868. Edited by Elizabeth Duquette and Claudia Stokes, Penguin, 2019.

"A symbol of something, to be sure...but still a symbol..."

22 February 2024: "Can’t people tell picture from substance, a metaphor from its meaning? That book of Revelation is precisely what it professes to be,—a vision; a symbol. A symbol of something, to be sure, and rich with pleasant hopes, but still a symbol. Now, I really believe that a large proportion of Christian church-members, who have studied their Bible, attended Sabbath schools, listened to sermons all their lives, if you could fairly come at their most definite idea of the place where they expect to spend eternity, would own it to be the golden city, with pearl gates, and jewels in the wall. It never occurs to them, that, if one picture is literal, another must be. If we are to walk golden streets, how can we stand on a sea of glass? How can we ‘sit on thrones’? How can untold millions of us ‘lie in Abraham’s bosom’?” (Phelps 46). 

In this passage, Mary's Aunt Winifred just tears into Biblical literalism. This book is something else. Phelps wrote this in 1868--and it was a huge bestseller!

Work Cited

Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart. The Gates Ajar. 1868. Edited by Elizabeth Duquette and Claudia Stokes, Penguin, 2019.

"demand[ing] a piece of squash pie..."

18 February 2024:"The phenomena occurring in his Connecticut home included floating candlesticks, walking chairs, leaping dishes, bent forks, turnips falling from nowhere, images made of underclothing that came from locked cupboards, and‘ 'alphabetical raps [...] demand[ing] a piece of squash pie’" (Harde 249).

I got such a kick out of the opening to Roxanne Harde's article about Phelps and spiritualism. In the passage above, Harde describes the haunting that Phelps's grandfather--a God-fearing minister--experienced in his home. 

Work Cited

Harde, Roxanne. “‘God, or Something Like That’: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Christian Spiritualism.” Women’s Writing, vol. 15, no. 3, Dec. 2008, pp. 348–70. EBSCOhost.

"a vast undiscovered country..."

17 Feburary 2024: "Writing to George Eliot in 1873, [Elizabeth Stuart] Phelps observed that 'women's personal identity is a vast undiscovered country with which Society has yet to acquaint itself, and by which is it yet to be revoutionized" (qtd in Duquette and Stokes xix).

Fully emerged in all things Elizabeth Stuart Phelps for my next entry. Besides the titles of her best-known novels--and a loose understanding of The Gates Ajar's plot--I didn't know much about her at all before starting this research. The quotation above is a great example of how compelling and important she seems to be. 

Work Cited

Duquette, Elizabeth and Claudia Stokes. Introduction. The Gates Ajar, by Elizabeth Stuart Phelp, Penguin, 2019, pp. vii-xxv.