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  • Blanche Willis Howard (1847-1898)
  • Melanie S. Gustafson

In 1877, Blanche Willis Howard moved from what she described as the "close confinement" of her hometown of Bangor, Maine, to Stuttgart, Germany, where she had the "absolute freedom" to pursue a life as a writer (MWWC, to E. H. Howard, undated fragment). In a writing career that spanned twenty-five years, twenty-three of them spent in Germany, Howard published nine novels, a travelogue, and numerous short stories, poems, and translations. For several decades her works were popular and eagerly awaited by her publishers and the reading public, even if today they are not well known. She published in children's magazines and adult periodicals in America, England, and Germany, and the full extent of what she published is still to be discovered. The record that has come together so far reveals her to have been a writer who resisted the literary conventions that demanded women focus on local color and regional writing. In many of her novels, women purposely wander away from their homes and cultures to seek


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Fig. 1.

Blanche Willis Howard (1847-1898). Houghton, Mifflin publicity portrait. Courtesy of the Blanche Willis Howard Collection, Maine Women Writers Collection, University of New England, Portland, Maine.

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more meaningful lives. Howard herself wandered, not in search of adventure, but to live an expatriate life that afforded her the broad education, cultural interactions, and seclusion and privacy she believed necessary for her writing. She was, in the opinion of one writer, "with the single exception of Mr. Henry James, the only American novelist who found a long exile and a firm hold upon the American public at all compatible" (Dunbar 155).

Howard wanted to be recognized as a serious writer, but she did not welcome publicity about her personal life. In one of her few interviews, which appeared in 1898, the year she died in Munich, Germany, Howard told journalist Olivia Howard Dunbar that she valued living "remotely in Europe" (155).1 The interviewer reported that the "roar of the Atlantic was quite loud enough to dull the echo of public opinion long before it reached quiet Germany, and appreciation must have come to her quite distilled, in the form of letters or, more or less belated, through the press" (162). In Germany, she continued, Howard had "found at all times much the greatest stimulus in an atmosphere not freighted with prejudices and ready-made opinions of many 'literary centres'" (163).

Early in her career, Howard laughed privately about people who speculated that the characters and events in her books were "real." When a critic stated that Leigh, the protagonist of her first novel, One Summer, was actually the author, Howard countered, remarking in a letter to her sister, Marion Howard Smith, "Leigh was about as much like me as the cat" (Bowdoin, 23 April 1880). She put such speculators into a group she called "commercial critics" and told her sister that they knew nothing "whatever of my life and its motives" (Bowdoin, 9 December 1883). Howard issued her strongest statement about critics who intruded into her personal life in 1892, just after Houghton Mifflin published a new edition of the still popular One Summer, with illustrations by Augustus Hoppin, and just as her new book, a collaboration with the British writer William Sharp, A Fellow and His Wife, was about to appear. According to a New York World reporter, Howard had written One Summer after an unrequited romantic adventure with an unnamed man left her despondent and forced her to flee to Europe. To this tale, Howard reacted with anger in an unpublished response titled "American Alligator." The "allegation is false," she wrote, calling such gossip about her life "a kind of libel." Howard argued that only "the author" of a text "can understand how those mysterious beings, his own creations, gradually assume shape, and it would perhaps be well for the general public to manifest less credulity toward flying reports about them." She put the blame not on the public but on the critics, writing, "I personally consider it unmanly and ungenerous, as well as a confession of lamentable poverty...

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