[1] In the opening chapter Howells introduces the Talbert family, middle-class New England proprietors of a silverplate works that turns out ice-pitchers and other mundane household items.

Daughter Peggy Talbert has just returned from her coeducational college engaged to a harmless but rather weak young man named Harry Goward.

Eventually, after many twists and turns introduced by the subsequent contributors, Harry Goward is dismissed as a suitor, Aunt Elizabeth is sent off to New York City, and a more suitable mate for Peggy is found in a college professor named Stillman Dane.

[3] Mark Twain may have inspired the collaboration after previously suggesting a similar project involving himself, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Bret Harte, and others, though the idea was dismissed.

Freeman apparently took issue with Howells's reference to the old maid aunt as a quiet old spinster and transformed her from a minor character to be pitied into a major one to be envied.

Jordan, herself unmarried, was impressed by Freeman's character and, as she called it, the "explosion of a bombshell on our literary hearthstone", but she dealt with considerable negative response from some of the other collaborators, particularly Howells and van Dyke.

have pointed out, the rest of the novel became an effort by the later writers to cope somehow with this introduction of Aunt Elizabeth as a sexual competitor with Peggy for her fiancé's affections.

[10] In serial form, the chapters were published anonymously, though there was an accompanying list of contributors and a teasing note that an "intelligent reader" would "experience no difficulty in determining which author wrote each chapter—perhaps.

[1] Elizabeth Jordan later utilized the collaborative authorship approach in the book The Sturdy Oak (1917), in which several authors wrote on behalf of woman's suffrage.

Its contemporary popularity was spurred by the literary novelty of the project, as well as the guesswork required from its initial anonymous publication, in addition to rumors of in-fighting between contributors.

"[citation needed] In his long, dense but insightful chapter, and with charged rhetoric reminiscent of his late novels, Henry James has the aesthetic son Charles Talbert rail against the frustrations that he and his equally artistic wife Lorraine experience due to the claustrophobic realities of family life in his small New England town: James might as well have been talking about the frustrations that many of the authors felt with the "family" of their collaborators.