Mary Stewart Doubleday Cutting

Her works fall under the general classification of domestic realism, a type of fiction popular with women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In making cold calls, however, they find an employer who has a job for their younger brother, which is enough to sustain them for the time being but not enough for them to move from the impoverished area in which they are living.

Overseen by Harper's Bazaar editor Elizabeth Jordan, The Whole Family:A Novel by Twelve Authors was serialized in the magazine before being published in 1908.

In 2001, Duke University Press reissued the novel, calling it "[o]ne of the most fascinating experiments in American literature..." (Cover description).

The authors were paid a flat fee for the serial publications, and royalties on book sales became the property of Harper's Bazaar.

Cutting—in some places Ashton refers to her as Mary Stuart Cutting—was paid much less than some of the authors but more than Howells, whose contribution was considered part of his salaried employment for the magazine.