This volume of essays and short stories by Harriet Beecher Stowe was written under the pseudonym Christopher Crowfield. As with many women of her time, Stowe took on a male pseudonym in order to make her work more acceptable to male dominated literary outlets, such as the Atlantic Monthly, where these works were originally published. Focusing on the domestic American household of the 1860s, the short pieces comment on the changes wrought by the Civil War. The wartime economic boom brought inexpensive consumer goods to more households. What was once a homey, comfortable parlor, the center of family activity, became a showplace, locked up like a museum. Simple home life became more complex. And Stowe, alias Crowfield, with her precise eye for social phenomena, found this domestic change worth chronicling.