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Epilogue FOUR CHAPTERS FOLLOW in Mrs. Harrison’s original Recollections. In those final chapters she provides details about her life in New York City. Burton Harrison’s law practice was successful. The family spent its summers in their cottage at Bar Harbor, Maine. Constance performed in small musical productions, she continued writing, and she and her husband were active in New York society. Her memoir continues to about the time of her husband’s death in 1905. She died fifteen years later, in 1920, nine years after the publication of Recollections—her last significant work. Constance Harrison’s literary output between the family’s move to New York City and Burton’s death was extensive. Between 1876 and the 1911 release of Recollections Grave and Gay she was responsible for more than thirty publications, including novels, plays, children’s books, and loosely fictionalized pieces of Virginia history. She wrote The Well-Bred Girl in Society,1 a detailed guide for young women preparing to make an entrance into society. Her goal for Well-Bred Girl, she noted, was to “aid girls in the smaller as well as in the larger cities of the country to be in all things representative of what is best and loveliest in American womanhood.”2 She followed Well-Bred Girl in 1890 with the best-selling novel The Anglomaniacs,3 a tale in which she described the desire of New York’s nouveau riche to link their daughters with European titles. In her postwar writing, especially in The Well-Bred Girl in Society and in The Anglomaniacs, Mrs. Harrison observed the societal changes that occurred after the Civil War, specifically changes in elements related to social status, deference, and acceptance. She indicated in The Well-Bred Girl that aristocratic social standards changed after the Civil War, and that the change was not necessarily for the better. Harrison described the genteel style and behaviors of antebellum society as low key and non-ostentatious: Epilogue 198 The inherited aristocracy opened its doors graciously to those whose talents and energy had lifted them to stand on a par with their entertainers. Thrift in business, probity in affairs, intellectual supremacy were the chief keys to unlock portals desirable to enter. The general quietude of life, the early hours kept, the sanctity of the home circle in which the guest was deemed honored to be included— not merely allowed to see drawing room and dining-table once a year, then rigidly cut out till the next time, as now—all conspired to further the process of “simplification,” insisted upon by Tolstoy as necessary to the ideal social life. She experienced post–Civil War society as noticeably different: The middle period of the nineteenth century presents to the student of New York sociology a less inviting aspect than the one preceding it. People who had made fortunes by purveying to the gentry were beginning to push their way past their early patrons. The newly enriched lost no time in fulfilling the necessary conditions of the then fashionable life. They took pews in Grace Church, boxes at the opera, wore cashmere shawls, set up a carriage with coachman in livery instead of the buggy and pair with which they had been wont to spin along Third Avenue; subscribed to the Society Library, The Home Journal, and Trobriand’s Review; bought their books of Crowen, the trousers of Derby, their bonnets of Miss Lawson, put their names on the lists of “Dickens balls” and the Washington Monument; and last, but not least contrived to get themselves into the good graces of the indispensable Mr. Brown. No chapter of the period would be complete without allusion to this portly carriage-opener, the link between the curbstone and society, as he was styled by some ready wit.4 Much of Harrison’s later writing was social commentary. She observed and noted a shallowness and callowness of the aristocracy of the Gilded Age. She wrote of what might describe as the “shoppiness” of the late-nineteenthcentury nouveau riche—the fantastic wealth of the North’s leaders of business and industry—wealth that came from shops and industry. To a woman of Harrison’s upbringing, class was a product of breeding and heritage. Her southern aristocratic point of view was in stark contrast to many of those with whom she lived the last half of her life, people to whom prestige and social standing were determined by wealth and ostentatious competition. Constance was very much sensitive to...

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