"A Wasted Sympathy": Undiagnosing Winifred Howells

Opening her poem "A Wasted Sympathy" with a command against pity, Winifred Howells (1863–89) instructs readers how (not) to read her poetry—guidance unheeded by those who would write about her life and work. Howells, daughter of novelist William Dean Howells, experienced years of nervous illness before her early death under the care of the notorious S. Weir Mitchell. Speculation regarding her death has lent her a small but persistent role in scholarship. Her poetry, though, has been largely ignored or read as symptoms of despair and decline. In this article, I reframe Howells as an agent rather than object of literary history, asking how her illness poetics might intervene in the kinds of illness narratives that shaped her experience and continue to challenge our ability to see her poetry as assertive, ironic, and ultimately experimental. In reevaluating Howells's biography and work, this essay attempts to move past concerns with the diagnosis of her illness to privilege her experience of it and her complex rhetorical and aesthetic negotiations of gendered discourses of illness.