My city library has a selection of "Books Your Parents and Grandparents Loved" out, a mishmash of reprinted classics, old Issue Novels, and gloriously moldy cheese. I twirled my whiskers and went for the cheese.
This one does well by its mold. It's basically a story, of an opinionated, bookish, pre-Woman young woman who makes mistakes and learns to be a better person. This is not tedious because Haley isn't cheating; her heroine really does make mistakes and they're embarassing and she changes afterwards, though not lots. The visiting poor cousin neither worships at her shrine nor gets molded into an upper-class young thing. (More on that later; it gave me the one total surprise of the book.)
Nor are there plot coincidences or deathbed conversions; although hugely concerned with being good Christians, these people live in a world of practical causality. The didacticism is under control.
Historical details:
...having had a small fortune left him, he[r father] was able to give up a profession [in the law] for which he did not care much, to take up the farm life he did enjoy.
a saleratus cake (it goes wrong, because made by the poetry-quoting rich daughter Gertrude, not the practical and precise poor cousin Florence).
There seems to be a serious labor dearth, so much so that household servants set their conditions, though maybe not their wages. True, in 1906? This is set outside commuting distance from any large city, and I think the family isn't quite rich enough that their help lives in.
Haley (like Alcott; see An Old-Fashioned Girl) approves of women who support themselves. It's Florence who didn't think there was a ladylike way to do that:
... the warm friendship of these girls for each other, on terms of perfect equality, though Miss Casson, incomparably the gayer, better-dressed and more popular, was working her own way through college, while Emma was a rich man's daughter, brushed away a few more of her disappearing class prejudices.
Of Casson and a young man:
Miss Casson, by the way, took the reins from Thorsby at the end of the first mile, remarking that as she was not now playing golf, she preferred to go around the hazards rather than over them. She knew how to drive and he did n't, so both were satisfied.
There's also a nontraditional young man, who everyone takes lightly, but who is going to go to the city and make a living as a wallpaper designer.
Florence figures out how she's going to make her living when a masonry accident brings a crushed hand into the house, and she's the calmest person there. Send me to the bottom of the class; I thought she was going to train to be a nurse - but the doctor says,
"Well, young lady, do you think you'll be able to take off a man's fingers yourself next time?" This was his only recognition of her coolness, when all was done.
"I mean to, sometime." The admission was drawn from her by the excitement of the hour, which she had not otherwise shown except by the darkening of her eyes. ... "I should n't care for the pills and powder people so much. I might not have patience, I'm afraid, with their whims and complaints. But—yes, I should like to 'chop.' I'd like to see how the inside of you looks this minute, Gertie Gleason!"...
"It cannot be unwomanly to make the best of any talent God has given you.
that last from the mother of the family, who is Perfect. Nor is this dreamy utopianism; the novel is dedicated to three girlhood friends, one of whom "was to be known in a great city with M.D. written after her name".
The Seattle Public Library copy was given by Haley herself, and for all I can tell is the second-to-last trace of her; Worldcat doesn't list it, but she did write a story indexed in FictionMags. FictionMags is a serendipitous find; the tables-of-contents are such a picture of daily worries and ambitions.
Haley, Mary Murkland. A Dornfield Summer. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1906.
So wrote clew in Fiction (20th c.).