Whohoo!!! Joan of Arc!!!!!

I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation and got none.

—Mark Twain, 30 Nov 1908¹

Professional readers—reviewers, academics, publishers, editors—have never much liked Mark Twain's Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte. Academics have by and large ignored it or relegated it to the bottom of Twain's oeuvre. At least half of the scholarly articles written about Joan of Arc in the twentieth century begin apologetically, aware that they are about to tackle a novel that "no one" (meaning no other literary professional) likes. "Most readers have not agreed with Mark Twain in liking Joan of Arc best of all his novels," begins a typical discussion, this one from the abstract for Wilson Carey McWilliams' article on Joan of Arc in the Review of Politics in 2007.² Williams was writing into a critical consensus; for the professionals, Joan of Arc has been problematic from the novel's first publication. Early reviewers anticipated the ongoing critical landscape: "I dare say there are a good many faults in the book," temporized W. D. Howells in 1896.

It is unequal; its archaism is often superficially a failure; if you look at it merely on the technical side, the outbursts of the nineteenth-century American in the armor of the fifteenth-century Frenchman are solecisms. But in spite of all this, the book has a vitalizing force. Joan lives in it again, and dies, and then lives on in the love and pity and wonder of the reader.³

For Howells, Twain's contemporary and good friend, Twain's portrayal of Joan outweighed the novel's technical errors. In contrast, James Westfall Thompson found little to praise. Criticizing Joan of Arc's "labored spontaneity" and "artificial style," he claimed that "the actors move like figures in a panorama; their language is neither wholly medieval nor wholly modern, and the thought that is swayed in it is a curious blending of medieval concepts and modern ideas." Joan of Arc, he opined, "is without plot, while the pretension to be history makes it amenable to the criticism to which historical writing must always be subjected."⁴ Like Thompson, most of the critical commentary on Joan of Arc in the twentieth century (there wasn't much) saw its technical flaws outweighing its virtues, both in terms of its language and its sentimentality. What critical commentary exists usually comes within a discussion either of Twain's other historical fiction or of his female characters; most commentators, myself among them, lament the hagiographical nature of Twain's treatment of his heroine, the distance he creates between her and the reader through his first-person narrator, and his celebration of her chastity, femininity, and domesticity—her "girlishness" (Twain's word)—over her military accomplishments. An exception to this critical consensus is Christina Zwarg, who argues that Joan of Arc is in fact about reading women out of history: the novel, she insists, is "neither a sentimental nor transcendent attempt to inscribe the innocent female into history, as has been supposed; it is rather a study of the way in which Joan of Arc, as representative woman, has been written out of history by this very act of inscription."⁵ In Zwarg's reading, then, Twain's insistence that under her military guise Joan was a True Woman is actually his critique of the propensity to erase women from history rather than an act of erasure itself. It's a brilliantly worked out argument that has yet to change the prevailing view.

The fact that most literary professionals find Joan of Arc unworthy is the main reason it is so unknown. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc barely exists in the Mark Twain canon—one rarely finds it in bookstores, at least not under "Mark Twain"; on syllabi, or even mentioned in critical discussions of books on...