Harriet continued to write for publication until 1878. Her non-fiction (or semi-fictional) works, including sketches and essays with fictional narrators, mostly written for various periodicals, were eventually collected in book form as Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands (1854); Household Papers and Stories (1865–67, 1896); Little Foxes (1866); Palmetto Leaves (1873); Women in Sacred History (1874); and Footsteps of the Master (1877).
Her long fiction after Uncle Tom's Cabin is uneven in quality. Both Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856, written during the violent period following passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act) and The Pearl of Orr's Island (1862) start strongly but weaken toward the end, while Agnes of Sorrento (1862), set in a romanticized Italy, is relatively shapeless and shallow. Oldtown Folks (1869), which Harriet hoped would be her masterpiece, suffered from domestic distractions she endured while attempting to finish it, including the necessity to find adequate care for her son Fred, a struggling alcoholic. My Wife and I and Pink and White Tyranny, both published as magazine serials in 1871, are fictional criticisms of contemporary figures and ideas in the women's rights movement. Her last work, Poganuk People (1878), written when Harriet was in her late sixties, is more successful, probably because in writing it she felt not only less pressure to make a specific political or moral statement but also less pressure to complete the work in a specific length of time.
Harriet's most controversial publication came in 1869, with "The True Story of Lady Byron's Life," published in Atlantic Monthly, in which she revealed the scandalous "secret" (actually fairly well known in private circles) of the famous English poet's brief marriage and notorious separation from his wife. The uproar caused by this article prompted her to write Lady Byron Vindicated (1870), which she hoped would support the Atlantic article (as A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin had done for her famous and controversial novel) but which was itself vilified and ridiculed.
