this book was positive. Her readership of the Miller's Tale, composed of male scholars, women, and children, read and laughed at it. Domestic decor Motivated by her preoccupation with style and domestic order, several books on decoration, dress, and household matters followed. From 1880 she wrote essays on artistic houses, first published in the magazine The Queen, later collected in a book. Although she had servants and attended many social events, money was tight and she had to fund her lifestyle through her writing. Though Haweis was considered to be in the middle-class; she often deceived people as to her true social class with her thrifty yet elegant clothing, composed of economically procured, yet rare laces and exquisite fabrics. Her "rare personal beauty" and "good dressing" made people believe that she could afford costly material. Mary Eliza Haweis' series of publications on domestic decor: The Art of Beauty (1878), based on shorter articles she had written some years earlier for the "Saint Paul's Magazine," The Art of Dress (1879), and The Art of Decoration (1881), demonstrated her knowledge of the broad history of fashion and expressed her views on the dangers some fashions could pose to health. Some of her views on the necessity, even duty of women appearing well led to some good-natured sarcasm directed at the volume by The Contemporary Review, which complained, "In a word, Mrs. Haweis will spare nothing, and not shrink from anything, which will prevent our giving one another the least personal shock; she is for using every means to make quite sure that everybody will visibly delight everybody else. It is very pleasant to think of. Certainly, there would have to be a good deal of dressing going on for this, especially in some cases, and how amidst it all we could be guarded against being upset by glimpses of one another at times before the toilettes were completed, it is not easy to see. However, Mrs. Haweis can only deal with this world as she finds it." Believing that decoration should be both useful and in harmony with natural proportion, she produced Rus in Urbe: Flowers that Thrive in London Gardens & Smoky Towns (1886) and The Art of Housekeeping: a Bridal Garland (1889), a practical household management guide for newly married women. Later life During the last ten or fifteen years of her life, Haweis lost interest in her artistic occupations;