Helen and Arthur

Two children raised in the same southern household grow up to marry the wrong people, and the injury is repaired by an act nobody expects. Caroline Lee Hentz wrote enormously popular domestic novels in the 1850s, and this is her most sustained. The domestic detail — servants, kitchens, illnesses, money — is more interesting now than the plot it supports. Fifty-eight plates by painters including Eastman Johnson and James McNeill Whistler follow the novel's rooms and kitchens, its spinning wheels, sofas and household work.