Between 1872 and 1875 she held no more classes. Moving from boardinghouse to boardinghouse, she was absorbed in the writing that now took most of her time. For a while at the end of 1872 she lived with Dorcas Rawson and her mother, where everything was “so quiet pleasant scientific and comfortable” that she had “a better opportunity to write than ever before.”¹²⁵ In January she wrote, “I am very happy this winter in the performance of my labors.”¹²⁶ But this Elysian state did not last, and she moved back to the Clark boardinghouse where she had stayed in 1866. For six months she lived with Putney Bancroft and his wife, for six months with the George Allens. There were shorter stays in other places, for always there seemed to be difficulties that drove her on and always the need was for greater quiet in which to write her book.

Single-minded, she moved through an age of roaring sensationalism. The election of 1872 returned Grant and his sordid administration to power. Then came the Credit Mobilier scandal, the Great Bonanza following the discovery of silver in Nevada, and the disastrous stock market crash of 1873 which plunged Lynn into five years of terrible economic hardship. Critics have assailed Mrs. Glover for not leaping to the defense of the hard-pressed Lynn workingman in the labor struggles of that period, as Lydia Pinkham did; but she was striking out, as she saw it, for rights that would free men from the far more basic tyranny of matter.

Walt Whitman, looking at the tawdry scene, was writing with stalwart faith in his “Song of the Universal”:

Forth from their masks, no matter what,
From the huge festering trunk—from craft and guile
          and tears,
Health to emerge, and joy—joy universal.

Out of the bulk, the morbid and the shallow,
Out of the bad majority—the varied, countless frauds 
          of men and States,
Electric, antiseptic yet—cleaving, suffusing all,
Only the Good is universal.¹²⁷