To almost nothing of her work, save that at the very last, did she sign her own name. She had an aversion to publicity that became really a mannerism. Her early work she signed variously or not at all, then for a time she settled upon the initials "H. H." It is no secret now that she wrote the much-speculated-upon novels _Mercy Philbrick's Choice_ and _Hetty's Strange History_ in the No-Name Series, and that the _Saxe Holm Stories_, which furnished the literary mystery of the seventies, were from her pen. They are love stories of the _Lamplighter_ school of fiction, sentimental, over-intense, moralizing. General and colorless as most of them are, they here and there display a rare power of characterization and a sharply drawn study of background and conditions. Parts of "Farmer Bassett's Romance," with its analysis of the "pagan element" in New England character, are worthy of Mary E. Wilkins. The stories, however, belong with the old rather than the new, and have been forgotten. It is impossible to understand "H. H." without taking into account her New Englandism. She was a daughter of the Brahmins, in many ways a counterpart of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps--intensely conscientious, emotional, eager in the reform of abuses, brilliant, impetuous. While visiting California in the mid seventies she came in contact with the Indian problem and with characteristic impulsiveness set out to arouse the nation. After six months of intense work in the Lenox library of New York she published her _Century of Dishonor_, a bitter arraignment of the national Indian policy, and at her own expense sent a copy to every member of Congress. As a result she was appointed one of two commissioners to examine and report upon "the condition and need of the Mission Indians of California." Her report was thorough and businesslike, but it accomplished little. Then she conceived the purpose of enlarging her area of appeal by the publication of a story--on the title page it stands _Ramona. A Story_. The problem preceded plot and materials and background. "You have never fully realized," she wrote only a few weeks before her death, "how for the last four years my whole heart has been full of the Indian cause--how I have felt, as the Quakers say, 'a concern' to work for it. _My Century of Dishonor_ and _Ramona_ are the only things I have done of which I am glad now."[116] And earlier than that she had written: "I have for three or four years longed to write a story that should 'tell' on the Indian question. But I knew I could not do it; I knew I had no background--no local color."[117]