My Wife and I, Or, Harry Henderson's History

"[Harriet Beecher Stowe's] love story involves Harry Henderson, the narrator, who comes to New York to work in publishing, and Eva Van Arsdale, the daughter of a wealthy Wall Street financier. But while Stowe develops the love story, she also evokes three major forms of nostalgia widely expressed in middle-class culture during this time: the longing for the kind of religious experience that presumably existed in the past, the longing for communion with nature, and the longing for family-centered rural communities like the ones Horace Bushnell and others had described in their pastoral accounts of pre-industrial New England."--Colby quarterly.