Earthbound and Heavenbent: Elizabeth Porter Phelps and Life at Forty Acres (1747-1817)

If you want a personal view of the past, and a unique opportunity to imagine living in an old house when it was new....this book is for you! Please enjoy this labor of love by the author, who compiled and created a detailed and well-researched volume that brings history to life! It is a must-read for anyone with a connection to Western Massachusetts!

The reviewer who found this book dull must have been reading a different book than the one I read. I thought this was the most interesting biography I've read in a long time and I read a lot of biography. I loved it because the author, unlike so many recent historians, did not turn her subject into a modern woman in ancient dress. She didn't discover hidden signs of feminism or modern emotions. Instead, she gave us, bit after bit the little observations and thoughts that build up the picture of how different the thought-world and emotional life of a woman in this period was from ours. I thought the author did a particularly good job of bringing alive the very alien Calvinist worldview with which Phelps lived. She and made me realize the extent to which we have sentimentalized our view of our New England forbears and forgotten how extreme their religious views were. I have read many books about religious history, but this one somehow got at the core of what it meant to live with the philosophical ideas that the other books explain. The author also made me think, long and hard, about what it was like to live in a world where children frequently woke up with what seemed like a cold and were dead within the day. Phelps' relentless focus on the state of her soul and her terror of eternal damnation made sense to me as the author showed us how her friends and family so often were snatched away by death with no warning. I also loved the way that the author made the house a kind of metaphor for the larger family and community life which took place within it. I have driven by this particular house many times as it is on my way home from the local shopping mall, but had never had any idea how many people lived there, worked there, visited there, and even, though strangers, stayed there for a night on their way, walking, to central Connecticut. I don't think I will ever look at any big old farmhouse the same way again now that I have more feeling for what the life in such a house was like. The author does not write like a graduate student. I throught her writing was deft, particularly in light of the nature of the primary source material she was working with, which is heavy going to read. It is no small task to make something readable out of this kind of writing. The author is not educated and does not write the kind of polished letters women wrote in the generation later when they grew up reading Burney and Austen. This is the writing of a woman whose reading was the Bible, hellfire sermons, and Pilgrim's Progress. I'd recommend this book to anyone who has a serious interest in New England History, social history or womans' history. If you enjoy this book, another book you'll want to read is OUR OWN SNUG FIRESIDE by Jane Nylander, which gives you a great deal of information about the physical details of daily life in the Porter-Phelps household.