Mary Jane Holmes's first article appeared in print when she was fifteen years old. By the time of her death at the age of eighty-two, her canon included more than forty novels and novellas, several collections of tales and stories, and many magazine publications. This extensive authorial production, combined with book sales in excess of two million copies, establishes Holmes as one of the most prolific and widely read writers of nineteenth-century America. She is also notable as one of the few women of her era to achieve financial independence with her pen. Long-term, relatively lucrative contracts with thriving publishing houses, an ever-increasing base of devoted readers, and frequent reprints of her novels afforded Holmes the leisure to pursue over the course of several decades the activity she loved best: composing what she described as "natural" stories of "domestic life as I know it to exist."

For Holmes...