Author and feminist, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward (1844-1911) was an early advocate of clothing reform for women, urging them to burn their corsets. This memoir originally published in 1896 and serialized, recounts anecdotes from her life in Massachusetts towns of Andover, Gloucester, Newton, and elsewhere. Over her long life she was friendly with: Celia Thaxter, Lucy Larcom, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Lydia Marie Childs, Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Andover author and feminist, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844 - 1911) was an early advocate of clothing reform for women, urging them to burn their corsets. Inspired by the Lawrence Pemberton Mill Tragedy of 1860, Phelps wrote this story based upon one of the actual workers Asenath S. Martin. It originally appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1868. Preface to this edition by Louise Sandberg, Special Collections, Lawrence Public Library, author of Lawrence in the Gilded Age. "The story is sentimental, but the events of that night are very real." Louise Sandberg

I had been ill for several weeks with what they called brain fever. The events which I am about to relate happened on the fifteenth day of my illness.

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward was born in Andover, Massachusetts on August 31st 1844 and baptized as Mary Gray Phelps. Her mother was ill for most of her adult life and died of brain fever shortly after the birth of her third child on November 20, 1852. Eight year old Mary Gray asked to be renamed in honor of her mother. Elizabeth attended the very well to do Abbot Academy and Mrs. Edwards' School for Young Ladies where her gift for telling stories was first noticed. By thirteen she had been published in Youth's Companion and other had appeared in Sunday School publications. At age 19 she sent...

There is_no vacant chair. The loving meet-- A group unbroken--smitten, who knows how? One sitteth silent only, in his usual seat; We gave him once that freedom. Why not now?