If Not Literature: Letters of Elinor Mead Howells by Ginette De B. Merrill and George Arms (review)

Book Reviews109 in imagining the father's love as incest, expresses Mary Godwin Shelley's devotion and anger toward her own father. Further, Mellor notes, Mathilda also suggests that the marital relationships idealized in so much nineteenthcentury fiction, of older, wiser men and younger, submissive women, imply, if not physical, psychological, incest. "When wives are child-brides, there can be no meaningful distinction between wives and daughters," as the astute Mary Wollstonecraft had already seen (198). Ironically, Mellor concludes, that while "celebrating the egalitarian bourgeois family, Mary Shelley [in depicting motherless families endangered by male egotism] acknowledges that it has never existed" (217). Neither can Shelley portray the self-sufficient woman she has never experienced; concluding Lodore (1835) with a brief sketch of the independent Fanny Derham, Mary Shelley simply suggests her fascination with this "unknown," whose story awaits "after times" (207). Absorbing and well written, Anne K. Mellor's Mary Shelley deserves to be read on this account alone; for those interested in Mary Shelley's life and work, however, or in the intellectual and emotional climate of that often sentimentalized Romantic circle, this well documented work is essential. ANN OWENS WEEKES University of Arizona GINETTE DE B. MERRILL AND GEORGE ARMS. If Not Literature: Letters ofElinor Mead Howells. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1988. 329 p. It is unsettling in reviewing a book to find oneselfpolitely chastened in that book's introduction. I am grateful that the editors did not reveal the name of the scholar responsible for writing: "One might say that both Howells and Mark Twain had bad luck with their wives." Mea culpa. The context of the remark was more sympathetic to both Livy Clemens and Elinor Howells than its bare appearance implies, for I was looking at the illnesses which beset both families and both partners in long and, I think, satisfying marriages from either the man's or woman's point of view. With respect to the health of Elinor Howells, as in many other ways, this volume adds a great deal. The letters are scrupulously edited with a wealth of informative notes and an introduction, all of which help expel the "patriarchal stereotype" through which wives of literary men of all the nineteenth century have been viewed. Elinor Mead Howells emerges more clearly from these letters than from any of the many biographical studies in which she has played a large part. Much else is to be learned from these letters. Elinor Mead was intelligent, talkative, witty, independent, but merged early in marriage in her husband's life and career. Before marriage she had established her possibilities as an artist, though no remark is more revealing of a young woman's position with 110Rocky Mountain Review respect to an artistic career than her father's, in admonishing her by letter to practice her music lessons with more resolution and less pouting: "I still expect to see you able to teach Music & to command the highest price for your instruction ..." (5). Elinor was not passive, either as a child or as a young woman, and she may have been less easily domesticated in marriage than these letters reveal. If Howells, through Basil and Isabel March, projects some tolerance of and condescension toward Elinor's ways, Elinor in the early letters reveals a gradual acceptance of a secondary position with respect to Howells' career. From Venice in 1863, she writes: "Mr. Howells keeps me writing from morning till night you see. ... I begin to think I'm rather more his secretary than his wife" (18). Tb her private diary about the same time, she reveals, "A stupid day because Pokey [a pet name she consciously abandoned once they had returned to America] was cross" (21, n. 8). Still, her overall mood of the Venice years is probably expressed in her observation, "a selfish delightful life we lead" (20). As might be expected, the correspondence while abroad and that during their first years in Cambridge (1863-1873) make up half, and the most interesting half, of the letters. It may be revealing of a woman's position with respect to a man's that Elinor's letters are for the most part outgoing, social, concerned with...