Conclusion

Abstract

When Edward Everett Hale was editing Old And New, a short-lived religious and literary magazine, he decided to run Six of One by Half A Dozen of Another, a collaborative novel of 1872 that was really an affair of his whole family. His sister Lucretia was his first recruit. They had already written A Struggle for Life together in 1861 and she later used her collaborating skills to write An Uncloseted Skeleton (1887) with her friend, the novelist Edwin Lassetter Brynner. Edward Everett Hale was also able to call upon the capable hands of his brother-in-law, Frederic B. Perkins and his own wife’s aunt, Harriet Beecher Stowe.

An achievement in art or in letters grows more interesting when we begin to perceive its connections; and, indeed, it may be said that the study of connections is the recognized function of intelligent criticism.

—Henry James, “Pierre Loti” 1888