Household Papers and Stories

Essays on the running of a house and stories to go with them: how to keep servants, what a home is for, the trouble with parlours, and the New England households Stowe grew up in. She wrote these for "The Atlantic" after "Uncle Tom's Cabin" had made her famous, under the name Christopher Crowfield. The domestic economy is practical and the social criticism inside it is not disguised. Fifty-three plates after painters from Chardin to Eastman Johnson follow the same thread as the text: kitchens, yarn-winding, and mothers at work, the ordinary labor that makes a house a home.