Publishing the Family, and: The Whole Family: A Novel by Twelve Authors (review)

In early 1906, William Dean Howells approached Elizabeth Jordan, editor of Harper's Bazar (as it was then spelled), with an idea for a serialized novel composed of twelve installments, each authored by a different writer. As he conceived it, the novel would examine the impact of a daughter's engagement on the social and emotional life of her family, and each chapter would advance the plot while charting the perspective of one family member. Underlying this project were corporate motives, as Howells and Jordan hoped to draw from and showcase writers associated with Harper's periodicals and publishing imprint. The result was The Whole Family (1908), a composite novel authored jointly by a varied assembly of turn-of-the-century writers, which included prestigious figures such as Howells himself, Henry Van Dyke, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and Henry James; it also included popular writers such as the humorist John Kendrick Bangs, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and the boy's-book writer Mary R. Shipman Andrews.

At the time of its publication, The Whole Family was widely viewed as a narrative and artistic failure, generically confused and composed of strikingly varied narrative voices and styles. Nor were contributors reluctant to voice their disappointment and disapproval of each other's work. Henry James's lengthy exposition in the voice of the artistic, misunderstood "Married Son" was roundly panned by critics and fellow contributors, among them Alice Brown, who lamented: "O Henry James! Why did he go pick-nicking with us!" What began as a novel about engagement quickly became an acrid public argument among twelve writers about, among other things, literary style and marriage, with numerous installments containing not a few pointed jabs at the work of their colleagues. In a few cases—Freeman's chapter devoted to the "Old-Maid Aunt" Elizabeth and Alice Brown's chapter in the voice of Peggy, the engaged daughter—contributors visibly responded to, criticized, and rejected the work and plot advances made by prior contributors.

June Howard's new book, Publishing the Family, places The Whole Family at the center of a deep, far-ranging analysis of early-twentieth-century literary and social culture. Although she claims that "this is not a book ‘about' The Whole Family" (2), Howard begins her study by skillfully recounting the back-story of this composite novel, situating its preoccupation with family in the context of Harper's corporate branding strategies. The dissolution of Harper's family management and its subsequent replacement with outside corporate leadership imperiled the Harper's company image, a crisis quelled by the deployment of family metaphors, evident in the creation of a "family" of Harper's writers, many of whom were enlisted by Howells and Jordan to contribute to a narrative figuration of this literary family.

These initial chapters relating the literary context of The Whole Family are subordinate to Howard's chief interest in the novel as a "point of entry for an examination of print culture and social life in the twentieth century" (2). To this end, Howard purposely attends to the conflicts among the contributors, some of which are more immediately visible and legible than others: the patter in The Whole Family about furniture and architecture is less transparent today than the persistent disagreement across numerous chapters about the status of the unmarried woman. Howard unpacks these disagreements in detail, glossing the cultural and literary disputes that fueled them and revealing The Whole Family to be the apogee of the "social text." Publishing the Family is an extraordinary achievement, dense with meticulous, carefully analyzed research and buoyed by Howard's own substantial gifts as a storyteller and wordsmith. Her avowed interest is "the interconnection of things," the foundational tenet of interdisciplinarity; true to...