Ward wrote three Spiritualist novels. The first, "The Gates Ajar", became her most famous. It took her two years to write. She wrote later that after she spent more than two years revising it, "I could have said it by heart." The book was finally published after the end of the Civil War. In it, she writes about a girl named Mary Cabot, whose brother was killed during the Civil War. The grief-stricken girl becomes convinced that she and her brother will be reunited in an afterlife in which people retain their physical shapes and personalities.