View a FREE sample

1. What is the premise of MARGRET HOWTH: A STORY OF TO-DAY?

MARGRET HOWTH: A STORY OF TO-DAY is Rebecca Harding Davis' novel of life in a textile mill town in Indiana in the early-1860s.

2. How does the author establish the bleak setting for the story and its protagonist's purpose for telling it?

The novel begins with the narrator, Margret Howth, explaining that she is about to tell a story of To-Day. Margret's world is a bleak one, where hunger and poverty rule and hope is a distant memory. Margret hopes that her story will be told when she is dead so that people will understand the anguish of the time in which she lived.

3. What has prompted Margret to write the story?

Margret shares that the reason that she is writing this book is because the sight of some old journals today has prodded her memory back to October 1860, and her life in a mill town in Indiana. The ledger is the record of the mill where she worked, Knowles & Co., a woolen manufacturing company.

(read all 60 Short Essay Questions and Answers)

This section contains 4,633 words (approx. 16 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample