Mary Stewart Cutting was an author and a suffragist. Her works fall under the general classification of domestic realism, a type of fiction popular with women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of Cutting's work focuses on navigating courtship and marriage. Her later works, coming at the very end of the nineteenth century and throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century, reflect more of a societal shift in how women were beginning to assert financial capability and independence.