Literature to this group of women was not only a heritage from the past, from great shadowy masters who were mere names and books, it was a home product in actual process of manufacture about their cradles. The mother of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps--Elizabeth Stuart--had published in 1851 _Sunny-Side_, a simple story of life in a country parsonage, that had sold one hundred thousand copies in one year. She had followed it with _A Peep at Number Five_, a book that places her with Mrs. Stowe as a pioneer depicter of New England life, and then, at the very opening of her career, she had died in 1852. "It was impossible to be her daughter and not to write. Rather, I should say, impossible to be _their_ daughter and not to have something to say, and a pen to say it."[104] The daughter was publishing at thirteen; at nineteen she was the author of twelve Sunday-school books;[104] at twenty-four she had issued _The Gates Ajar_, which was to go through twenty editions the first year and to be translated into the principal European languages. _Gates Ajar_ is a significant book, significant beyond its real literary merit. It is a small book, an excited, over-intense book, yet as a document in the history of a period and a confession laying bare for an instant a woman's soul it commands attention. It is not a novel; it is a _journal intime_, an impassioned theological argument, a personal experience written with tears and read with tears by hundreds of thousands. It was the writer herself who had received the telegram telling that a loved one--not a brother as the book infers--had been shot in battle; it was her own life that had almost flickered out as the result of it; and it was she who had tried to square the teachings ingrained into her Puritan intellect with the desolation of her woman's heart.