Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper

A young wife's account of housekeeping in an American town: the servants who come and go, the dinner that fails, the budget that will not balance, the husband who does not notice. Arthur left school at thirteen, half-blind and apprenticed to a watchmaker, and became one of the most widely read Americans of his century. This is domestic life recorded without a plot, and as social history it is worth a shelf of memoirs. Sixty plates by painters including Winslow Homer and Eastman Johnson turn their attention to houses, home and the rooms of daily life, the very ground this housekeeper walks.