Woman's Handiwork in Modern Homes.
[Domestic]. Harrison, Constance Cary. Woman’s Handiwork in Modern Homes. With numbered illustrations and five colored plates from designs by Samuel Colman, Rosina Emmet, George Gibson, [Louis Tiffany], and others. New York: Scribner’s, 1881.
8vo.; black and white illustrations throughout; five color illustrations with tissue guards; contemporary ownership signature; tan cloth decoratively stamped in brown; wear to extremities.
First edition of this detailed handbook with sections on embroidery, brush and pigment, and modern homes. The designs show the influence of Japanese art and William Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement. Tiffany and his associates, Candace Wheeler and Samuel Colman, designed the décor of many private homes, and the book gives specific direction for the middle class housewife to achieve an Esthetic effect.
At an early age known more for her “wit and beauty and for her performances in amateur theatricals” in high confederate society than in her writing (though she was staunchly anti-slavery she was, just as adamantly, pro-South), Constance Cary Harrison (1843-1920) published her first story in the Southern Illustrated News in the early 1860s. After her marriage in 1867 to Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s private secretary, Burton Norvell Harrison, she continued with her dramatic activities but also took a more aggressive interest in writing. She published several pieces as part of Richard Watson Gilder’s series on “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War” in Scribner’s, and “over the next two decades a stream of novels, magazine stories, and historical sketches poured forth from Mrs. Harrison’s pen, winning her a significant, if fleeting, literary reputation.” Victoria S. Roemele sums up Harrison’s literary endeavors:
Her novels and tales dealt sometimes with Southern life and manners (Flower de Hundred: The Story of a Virginia Plantation, 1890; Bellhaven Tales, 1892; A Daughter of the South, and Shorter Stories, 1892), sometimes with contemporary New York and international society, as in The Anglomaniacs (1890), in which she applied to the fatuities of New York society the gentle satire of an insider who can afford to smile at the descendants of colonial aristocracy shuddering over the parvenu invasion. Her etiquette book, The Well-Bred Girl in Society (1898), is more an ironic commentary on comparative social attitudes than a manual of proper behavior. An interest in decorative art found expression in Women’s Handiwork in Modern Homes (1891). She translated from the French a group of Short Comedies for Amateur Players (1889). She also wrote on Virginia history and contributed a brief supplementary volume, Externals of Modern New York (1896), to Mrs. Martha J. Lamb’s History of the City of New York. Her own memoirs, Recollections Grave and Gay, appeared in 1911. (NAW I, 146-47)
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