Latter-Day Sweethearts: Gilded Age Courtship, New York Society, and the Manners of Victorian American Romance

Burton Mrs. Harrison's Latter-Day Sweethearts is a refined study of courtship in a modern age, where inherited codes of sentiment confront urban sophistication, social ambition, and the sharpened self-consciousness of the late nineteenth century. Cast in the polished idiom of the American comedy of manners, the book treats love not as mere romance but as a test of character, class, and moral tact. Harrison's prose is urbane and observant, attentive to drawing-room conversation, feminine intelligence, and the small rituals by which private feeling becomes public fate. Constance Cary Harrison, publishing as Mrs. Burton Harrison, brought to such material an unusually layered experience of American society. Born into a distinguished Virginia family and marked by the Civil War-she helped fashion early Confederate flags-she later became a prominent figure in New York's literary and social world. Her fiction often reflects this double vision: aristocratic memory tempered by postwar mobility, cosmopolitan polish, and a keen awareness of women's constrained choices. Readers interested in Edith Wharton's precursors, postbellum social fiction, or the evolution of American romantic realism will find Latter-Day Sweethearts rewarding. It offers graceful entertainment with critical bite, illuminating how love adapts when tradition survives only by learning new manners.