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A review by jdintr
The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe: A Biography by Elaine Showalter
5.0
America could have had its own Bronte.
She was here at the same time, born three days before Queen Victoria. She was born with remarkable resources to care for her needs as she pursued a career in literature--her father was a wealthy Wall Street banker. She certainly had the literary connections, living in Boston as she did and rubbing shoulders with Emerson and Longfellow regularly. She had a drive, if not a talent, that would have made her the equal of any writer, male or female.
So why do we know so little of Julia Ward Howe--outside of her remarkable poem, "Battle Hymn of the Republic"?
That's the question that Elaine Showalter seeks to answer in The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe. Showalter lays out Howe's history, and follows her into the Black Hole of a marriage that consumed 30 years of her life. Howe's husband, Samuel Gridley Howe, was himself a striver, and typical of most husbands of the age, would not countenance a wife with an agenda of her own. Even as JWH relentlessly pursued her interests in poetry and drama, SGH blocked her, browbeat her, chided her for her ambition and single-mindedness.
The book could easily have been drawn into the maelstrom of marriage and never gotten out, but the final act of the book, as JWH becomes a suffragette and beloved elder stateswoman is inspiring and redeeming. Every chapter of this book was better than the previous one, and I was openly cheering for JWH.
Showalter's sense of literature helps the narrative. She takes breaks to compare JWH with contemporarites like Bronte and Walt Whitman. She doesn't try to oversell JWH's poetry--it doesn't really hold up--but she presents it and analyzes it wonderfully.
She could have been a Bronte or a George Sand. In Elaine Showalter's book, somehow JWH becomes something much more: an icon for American women, if not American writers.
She was here at the same time, born three days before Queen Victoria. She was born with remarkable resources to care for her needs as she pursued a career in literature--her father was a wealthy Wall Street banker. She certainly had the literary connections, living in Boston as she did and rubbing shoulders with Emerson and Longfellow regularly. She had a drive, if not a talent, that would have made her the equal of any writer, male or female.
So why do we know so little of Julia Ward Howe--outside of her remarkable poem, "Battle Hymn of the Republic"?
That's the question that Elaine Showalter seeks to answer in The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe. Showalter lays out Howe's history, and follows her into the Black Hole of a marriage that consumed 30 years of her life. Howe's husband, Samuel Gridley Howe, was himself a striver, and typical of most husbands of the age, would not countenance a wife with an agenda of her own. Even as JWH relentlessly pursued her interests in poetry and drama, SGH blocked her, browbeat her, chided her for her ambition and single-mindedness.
The book could easily have been drawn into the maelstrom of marriage and never gotten out, but the final act of the book, as JWH becomes a suffragette and beloved elder stateswoman is inspiring and redeeming. Every chapter of this book was better than the previous one, and I was openly cheering for JWH.
Showalter's sense of literature helps the narrative. She takes breaks to compare JWH with contemporarites like Bronte and Walt Whitman. She doesn't try to oversell JWH's poetry--it doesn't really hold up--but she presents it and analyzes it wonderfully.
She could have been a Bronte or a George Sand. In Elaine Showalter's book, somehow JWH becomes something much more: an icon for American women, if not American writers.