Taking material from the conventions of the sentimental romance, her Civil War years, and her acquaintance with aristocratic, politically important Southern families, Constance Cary Harrison wrote about fashionable society's genealogies, morals, customs, and matrimonial maneuvers of the last half of the nineteenth century. Her Virginia kinship relations, detailed in her autobiography Recollections Grave and Gay (1911), furnished the social credentials and elite class affiliation that sustained Harrison throughout her life. Her work belongs to a body of narratives different from the illustrated stories produced by newspaper, dime novel, and nickel and dime pamphlets between the 1840s and 1890s. Harrison's "silver fork" novels were reviewed and serialized in the major periodicals--Century , Scribner's, Harper's Bazar, and The Atlantic Monthly--and then published as books. By the 1880s realism and then naturalism supplanted the sentimental and romantic fictions that had dominated the literary scene, and by 1900 the public taste for best-selling...