In July 1879, Julia came home to the United States, reinvigorated by her long stay abroad and ready to take full advantage of her independence and her new ideas about women’s place in the world. She was now head of the family, and her most pressing task was to see her children properly established. She would also have to resist their urging that she slow down. She had begun committing herself to women’s causes before Chev’s death; as she turned sixty, she moved more and more into leadership positions. The most dramatic illustration was her decision to head the Woman’s Department for the New Orleans Cotton Centennial in 1884. In that job, she discovered skills in organizing and managing that she had never had a chance to develop before. The two decades of her sixties and seventies were her golden years, culminating in another trip abroad, this one triumphant in unexpected ways.
On their return from Europe in the summer of 1879, Julia and Maud went to Oak Glen, their summer house in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, twenty-five miles from Newport and close to her friends in the Town and Country Club. Reluctant to let the summer months go by without self-improvement, she had started this club in 1871. It brought writers and scientists vacationing in Newport together to listen to each other’s talks on astronomy, botany, marine biology, medicine, natural history, and literature. Mark Twain gave a reading, and Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, who later became a controversial specialist on neurotic women, lectured on snake poison. They also found time to be silly: Fanny Fern read an essay on rhinoscopy; a Harvard professor delivered a Greek version of “The Man in the Moon,” part of a series of recitations from Mother Goose in seven languages; and Julia presented the “Parlor Macbeth,” in which she posed as Lady Macbeth telling the story of the whole Macbeth family, including the three witchy Misses Macbeth. Between performances, she gave a number of talks and sermons, leading up to a fall lecture tour. On one whistle stop, her trunk was lost, and she had to improvise her speech and borrow an all-important black silk dress from the hostess. After that mishap, she always traveled with her lecture, lace cap, and clean collar in a lightweight palm-leaf knapsack from Santo Domingo.
As Maud had predicted, at summer’s end her mother wanted to be back in Boston, although two rooms at a boardinghouse called Benedict Chambers, on Beacon Hill, were all she could afford. When she fell on the marble steps at Perkins while visiting Julia Romana and tore the ligaments in her knee, Benedict Chambers was no longer manageable; and Sam Ward, now a prosperous lobbyist and speculator in railroad stock, stepped in with his accustomed largesse. He first moved Julia and Maud into a furnished house at 129 Mount Vernon Street, a neighborhood they knew well. Throughout the winter, she was still on crutches (she would reinjure her knee periodically for years), so Maud did the legwork to search for a suitable house to buy; she had become a shrewd judge of real estate and neighborhoods, having moved so many times with her parents. Finally, in April 1880 Uncle Sam installed them at 241 Beacon Street. They brought in the stored furniture from Green Peace, including Julia’s Chickering piano and a large portrait of Maud. And Sam sent them extravagant gifts such as a diamond-and-sapphire necklace for Maud, and shipments of wine for Julia—clarets, sherry, champagne, Moselle, and vermouth, “a tonic for young women, and an appetizer for young men and a sort of universal cocktail ante-prandial.”1 The years of temperance were over.
With such incentives, Howe was inspired to entertain lavishly. Twelve Zuni chiefs in full regalia came for lunch, but their moccasins, headbands, and kilts were eclipsed by her celebrity guest of the year: Oscar Wilde. Sam was sponsoring Wilde’s American lecture tour, and wrote to Maud, “His makeup is very extraordinary, long black hair hanging to his shoulders, brown eyes, a huge white face like the pale moon . . . a white waistcoat, black coat and knee breeches, black silk stockings and shoes with buckles. Until he speaks you think him uncanny as a vampire.”2 How enticing! Maud and Julia could not resist. When Wilde came to Boston to lecture at Harvard, they invited him to lunch; “delightful, simple and sincere and very clever,” Julia noted.3 Wilde was a frequent guest thereafter. A dinner party in his honor followed, and Wilde’s entrance, according to a child witness, was memorable. Julia clapped her hands for silence, and he slowly descended the staircase in the famous shoes and stockings, plus green velvet knee breeches, holding a lily.4 In the summer Wilde came to Oak Glen, and was “a rarely entertaining guest . . . [who] told endless stories of Swinburne, Whistler, and other celebrities of the day,” but Julia and Maud were temporarily thrown by the presence of his valet, Davenport. “It was one thing to entertain the Aesthete, another to put up the gentleman’s gentleman.”5 They recovered enough to make Wilde a round cake with a lemon peel and angelica sunflower in the middle.
In the winter of 1882–83, Harry, now a professor of metallurgy at MIT, and his wife, Fannie, came to live with them, paying for their share of expenses. Louisa’s handsome blue-eyed son Francis Marion Crawford, called Marion, who had joined them on Mount Vernon Street, joined them on Beacon Street, too. A multitalented wandering minstrel (he sang Schubert lieder and played the guitar) and a student prince, Marion had studied Sanskrit at the University of Rome, Harvard, and Allahabad in India, where he also edited a newspaper. Louisa was worried that he would never be able to earn a living, and sent him to Boston hoping to train his baritone voice for opera. The family asked George Henschel, the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, to teach him; but Henschel concluded that Marion “would never be able to sing in perfect tune.”6 Sam then suggested he might become a writer, and start with his experiences in India. He lobbied energetically for Marion in New York, introducing him to editors and publishers; and Marion’s first novel, Mr. Isaacs: A Tale of Modern India, was a popular success in 1882, followed in 1883 by Dr. Claudius, with an affectionate portrait of Uncle Sam as Mr. Bellingham.
In Boston, Marion quickly became the scandalous “protégé”—i.e., toy boy—of the imperious and seductive Isabella Stewart Gardner—“Mrs. Jack.” He was overweight and bibulous when he met her, but became “thin as a rail with temperance and exercise” under her guidance and gave her lessons on Dante in her private sitting room. Gossiping to William Dean Howells, Henry James wrote that the only excitement in the “social desolation of Boston” was “Mrs. Jack Gardner’s flirtation with F. Marion Crawford, the American novelist of the future.”7 In 1883, Mrs. Jack proposed taking Marion, Julia, and Maud on an all-expenses-paid trip to Japan, without her husband. At the last minute, Marion decided not to go and slipped away to England, to Julia’s great relief. “He has his reasons for wishing to keep very quiet about his movements,” she wrote to Maud. “I am very thankful that he has decided as he has. Cannot say more on paper. Mum is the word.”8 According to family members, Mrs. Jack was devastated, and Maud had to spend several days comforting her.9 When she finally left for her Asian tour, her husband went with her. The Howes remained friendly with Mrs. Jack, although Julia thought the notorious Sargent portrait with its deep décolleté had “great artistic merits and great faults of taste . . . The attitude is inexplicable and strikes many people as objectionable.”10
The lives of illustrious and accomplished women were much on her mind. In spring 1882 she was writing a biographical memoir of Maria Mitchell for a book on famous women, and editing Maud’s essay on her own life for the same volume.11 “I think I am eminent for undertaking ten times more than I can do, and doing about one-tenth of it,” she protested.12 In April she began a biography of Margaret Fuller, rewarding herself for her daily stint by reading a little Greek and an Italian novel. She finished the book over the summer at Oak Glen. Fuller’s story had been told in 1851 by James Freeman Clarke, William Henry Channing, and Emerson. Yet their great memoir, Howe argued, was “already set in a past light by the progress of men and of things,” and “it is through the growing interest felt in Margaret and her work that a demand seems to have arisen for a later word about her, which cannot hope to be better or wiser than the words already made public, but which may borrow from them the inspiration for a new study and presentment.” That growing interest came from the rise of the women’s suffrage movement, with Fuller one of its greatest heroines. Moreover, Howe used Fuller’s life story to explore her own education, philosophy, and politics in an oblique (auto)biography.13 In some respects, Howe tones down her own rebellion in contrast to Fuller. She defends the strict demands of Fuller’s autocratic father and qualifies her own passionate girlhood response to George Sand. “When Margaret wrote of her, the woman was at the zenith of her power, and the intoxication of her influence was so great that a calm judgment concerning it was difficult.” In maturity, Fuller would have tempered her enthusiasm: “much as she loved genius, that of George Sand could not blind her to the falls and falsities that marred her work.” Howe is critical of some of Fuller’s choices, but overall reveres her intelligence, her aspirations, and her humility. Above all, she presents Fuller as the model for the emancipated future: “as a woman who believed in women, her word is still an evangel of hope and inspiration to her sex.”14
Maud was writing, too, giving in to “the inevitable family calling of literature.”15 In addition to her essay on her mother, she wrote a clever Newport society column for the Boston Transcript. She also used local gossip in her first novel, A Newport Aquarelle, published anonymously in 1883. Laura was delighted with it, but warned her that “your pen is oversharp, my dearest child, just like your little naughtily two-edged tongue and you should not talk so about Boston if you mean to live there.”16In Maud’s opinion, though, she was doomed to play second fiddle to one relative or another; cousin Marion was expected to become the family novelist and got the support of Uncle Sam and the New York contingent. “He looked the whole bunch of us over,” she wrote, “as a stock raiser looks over his thoroughbreds, and picked Marion for the winner . . . He put his money on Marion.”17 No matter; having tried her hand as a painter of china, a landscape artist, and an actress, Maud decided that fiction suited her best. Her second novel, the San Rosario Ranch (1884), was a romance set in California, drawing on her visit to Aunt Annie and Uncle Do’s San Geronimo Ranch.
Under a clutch of pen names and pet names, Julia was juggling her different personae in letters to her sisters, her brother, and her favorite daughter, Laura. She was Old Bird, O.B., Old B., and Betsy Trig, to Sam and Annie; Ma, Mar, Mother, Mammy, Mus Wus, Ma-Cats, and Gramma Gray to Laura, who was variously called Wolly, dear little sweetheart, my sweetest lollipop, Pidge, dear little conscience, and très chère. She was juggling her public roles as well. At the end of 1883, she served as president of the women’s department of the Merchants and Mechanics Fair in Boston. During the winter she campaigned on behalf of the suffragists’ petition for three new bills: giving mothers and fathers equal rights in making decisions about their children, guaranteeing widows half of the husband’s estate after his death, and allowing husbands and wives to make economic contracts independent of each other.
Her speeches on these questions show how much more radical she had become since Chev’s death, and how much her marriage had taught her about the legal double standard faced by women in the nineteenth century. “Even women of fortune possessed nothing individually after their marriage. The ring which promised to endow them with all the bridegroom’s earthly goods, really endowed him all that belonged to them, even to the clothes that they wore. Their children were not their own. The father could dispose of them as he might think fit.”18 She had even come around to Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s view of male legal culpability for soliciting prostitutes.
As the literary and philosophical Mrs. Howe, she regularly attended cultural events in Boston; Matthew Arnold lectured on Emerson, very poorly, in Julia’s opinion: “Arnold does not in the least understand Emerson, I think. He has a positive, square-jawed English mind . . . His elocution is pitiable, and when, after his lecture, Wendell Phillips stepped forward and said a few graceful words of farewell to him, it was like the Rose complimenting the Cabbage.”19 She found time to read, but after her brother Sam died abroad (he had once again lost all his money, and fled to England to evade his creditors), fiction seemed both sentimental and shocking. “I think novels is humbug,” she wrote to Laura. “They don’t leave you anything but a sort of bad taste.”20
In order to reinvent herself, Julia needed to move away from her familiar milieu and longtime comfort zone. When she was unexpectedly invited in October 1884 to become the head of the Woman’s Department for the New Orleans Cotton Centennial, she seized the opportunity. Chev would never have allowed her to accept such an invitation, and the idea of a winter in the warm South, all expenses paid, was very appealing. Having discovered the comforts of female companionship, she arranged to take her support group with her, accepting the offer with the proviso that Ednah Cheney and Henrietta Wolcott, who had assisted her at the Boston fair, come along as her lieutenants. Maud came too as the chief of the Literary Department, and Maud’s good friend Isabel Greeley joined the team as Julia’s secretary and assistant. It was her first effort at leadership outside of Massachusetts, and it provided her with an education in realpolitik and an introduction to the strains and limitations of sisterhood.
Her appointment had raised great indignation and resentment among the women of New Orleans, who felt insulted that a Yankee, an abolitionist, and worst of all, the author of the despicable anti-Confederate “Battle Hymn of the Republic” had been chosen for the honor. They were further miffed that she was bringing her own staff, rather than hiring highly qualified—and needy—Louisiana ladies for these prominent positions. Even before Howe got to the city, there was resentment of her entitled behavior, and she had to win the women over. Her antagonists were progressive women, not the stuffy Boston Brahmins she had faced at home or the antisuffragists she had met on the road.
Catharine Cole, a journalist for the daily New Orleans Picayune (her real name was Martha Reinhard Smallwood Field), was the sharpest and most persistent local critic. Thirty-six years younger than Howe, a tough and clever veteran of urban journalism, and a widow from a working-class background, Cole was also an advocate of women’s rights. But the ladylike Howe, and her elegantly dressed daughter, were irresistible targets for her stinging observations and acerbic opinions. From the beginning, she made fun of Howe’s “rather dull and prosy books,” her dignified “Bostonness” style, and her snooty attitude. “Ah, well, we live in the hope that our Southern women will not be looked upon as such ‘ninnies’ at the next centennial celebration” was an opening salvo, and her sniping did not let up for the whole of Howe’s residence.21 Cole’s boss Eliza Nicholson was one of the few women to be proprietor, publisher, and editor of a major urban newspaper, and she was a formidable figure in New Orleans. She had hired Dorothea Dix to write a column and was a great supporter of women journalists, but she was no fan of Howe. Still, the Picayune’s campaign against Howe and her team made good copy and good sales, and gave the Woman’s Department a lot of coverage.
While the Southern ladies managed to keep up a gracious front, and welcome the Howes courteously to the Crescent City, behind the scenes there was envy, mistrust, gossip, and laughter at the Northern invaders. The Centennial opened on December 16, 1884, and the Boston contingent arrived by chartered steamer on the Mississippi, to be greeted by dignitaries and two military bands, plus the Mexican Band—the Mexican exhibit at the fair was the largest of all, and they had sent the Eighth Cavalry Regimental Band, which included a saxophonist and a clarinetist. When the fair ended, many of the Mexican musicians stayed on in New Orleans, where they had a huge influence on brass bands and early jazz. They would become a colorful staple of all public events at the Centennial, but Julia and Maud must have become weary of their music.
The women’s party landed near the fairgrounds and marched to the Main Building, to hear a welcoming telegram from President Chester A. Arthur. Howe was dismayed to find that the building was a mess; the roof leaked, and legislative funds to renovate it had not been delivered. She rallied the troops, reminding them that “women have sometimes built churches with no better instruments than thimbles and teapots!”22 Nevertheless, hustling to raise the money was challenging and stressful. She arranged a series of entertainments, beginning with her lecture on “Polite Society,” given at Werlein Hall to a large and definitely polite audience; then a soiree Creole, then a “grand musical matinee” on February 8 at the French Opera House, with benefit performances by several singers and musicians, and of course the Mexican Band, which raised $2000. This entailed diplomatic skills. “The difficulty of persuading the different artists to sing, of pacifying their separate agents in the matter of place on the programme and size of the letters in which names were advertised, of bringing harmony out of all the petty rivalries and cabals between the different members of the troupe, required a patience worthy of a better cause.”23
As her daughters wrote, Howe was developing “faculties hitherto dormant . . . far removed from her life habit of intellectual labor. She had moved into a new apartment in the house of life, one nearer the earth and not quite so near the stars.”24Julia and Maud had literally moved into a new apartment, a boardinghouse downtown, rather than a luxury hotel. While Maud persuaded state delegations to contribute books by women writers, Julia’s experience as the mother of a large family came into play as she balanced the rivalries of different regions, placated offended groups, and negotiated with the sensitive problems of race and religion. The Texans complained that their designated gallery was too small, and moved downstairs to a larger space; the Colored Ladies Exposition Association wanted their work to be shown in the Woman’s Department rather than the Colored Department; the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union wanted to hand out cups of ice water. Everyone complained about the shortage of women’s toilets. Running the Woman’s Department, she declared, was like “having a big Nursery to administer.”25
Slowly, her determination, commitment, indefatigability, personal charm, good manners, and, as always, appearance, won over even the Picayune. If visitors expected her to be “a stout, tall, stern, masculine looking woman, the idealized nightmare of suffrage,” they would be surprised and pleased to meet “a small, eminently womanish and gentle, motherly old lady, always dressed in black, and with snow-white hair and the superb, if somewhat old-fashioned, manners of a duchess.”26 When the Woman’s Department opened formally on March 3, 1885, the initial response was favorable. Julia had organized a series of twenty-four Saturday lunchtime talks, free to the public, and ranging from women writers in Japanese literature to Arctic explorations. Visitors admired the exhibits of women’s work from every state; women’s inventions ranging from a pie lifter, to a traveling commode in a dressing case; needlework; and “beautiful work made by aged women.”27
Smoldering hostility towards Howe and her Yankee entourage flared at the end of March when she incautiously sent a letter to the New England Woman’s Club about her sorry experiences in New Orleans. They promptly published it in theWoman’s Journal, and the Picayune snatched it up and reprinted it on Easter Sunday. No twenty-first-century hacker exposing an email correspondence could have done her more harm. She said that New Orleans was a gutter, that the promised funding had disappeared, and that she had to “grind and grind” to get things done. Catharine Cole pounced on every phrase: “Polite philandering with one side of the mouth and incessant complaint, reproach, or accusal with the other, made a very ugly visage, certainly not the visage of one of those whom the president of the Woman’s Department would term a ‘woman’s woman.’ ”28 Impressively, Julia did not run away but carried on with remarkable grace. No one had ever insulted her so directly and venomously; she had been protected by New England chivalry and class privilege. Nevertheless, recognizing that the success of the Woman’s Department depended on her ability to get along with the local women, she stifled her anger and continued to attend tea parties, lectures, and official events with a smile. Admiring audiences were drawn to hear famous women speakers, including temperance leader Frances Willard, radical suffragist Susan B. Anthony, and wealthy newspaper magnate Miriam Leslie, who had legally changed her name to Frank Leslie after her husband’s death, and managed his flagship Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly.
Maud, much ridiculed for her partying and fancy dresses, had nonetheless done a good job with the literary section. On Woman’s Day, May 30, she spoke at a celebration of the Exposition, presenting the women’s book collection to the Southern Art Union library. Julia presided, sitting on an incongruous leopard-skin cushion in an armchair made out of the “enormous horns of Texas oxen.” “She presides at everything & has done it so long that her air, manner, smile & language are actually threadbare,” Grace King wrote spitefully to her sister May.29 Maud’s speech was better accepted, although it started off badly. When she had been invited to join her mother in New Orleans, she recalled, “It seemed so absurd a thing to expect me to leave my home, my friends, my work.” When she arrived, she went on, “I hated the work. I hated New Orleans. I hated most of all the Exposition and said a dozen times, ‘I wish the Exposition was dead; I wish that it had never been born.’ ” Then, finally, she had heard Major Burke speak of his hopes for the Exposition: “My enthusiasm was roused,” she said, “and my heart was really in my work.”30 Only Maud could get away with such an artless confession.
At the end of May, Maud went home, but Julia stayed on despite feeling ill from the heat, the tension, and the exhaustion of carrying out her responsibilities. Once back in shady Oak Glen in July, she wrote to Laura to say, “How hot New Orleans was before I left it, you cannot know, nor how sick I was once upon a time, or how I came upon iced champagne and recovered myself, and became strong again. Ever since I came home, I have slaved at my report of the Woman’s Department . . . Putting a pen into an ink stand, and taking it out again, scribble, scribble, nibble, nibble . . . And go to bed between whiles.”31 For the next several months, she scribbled, nibbled, and lectured, getting more than two hundred dollars for a tour in Iowa alone.
She and Maud were living in New York when she heard at the end of February 1886 that Julia Romana had typhoid. Julia rushed back to Boston, where she was relieved to find her daughter improving. She reassured Maud that “there is nothing dangerous in Julia’s condition, and I can be away for two or three days without any risk or inconvenience to her.”32 After a board meeting of the New England Woman’s Club, she returned to New York. On March 9, an emergency telegram summoned her back to South Boston. She arrived barely in time to see her daughter die, two days short of her forty-second birthday, on March 10, 1886.
Julia tormented herself with the thought that she had neglected Julia Romana. “My heart agonizes again with the question ‘could dear Julie have been saved?’ Oh! The dreadful pain of uncertainty about this. I can bear everything else. God help me from thinking that all was not done that might have been done.”33 Julia Romana had not been on easy terms with her mother and siblings, although after her death they reproached themselves for appreciating her too little. Shy, awkward in company, studious, sensitive, and selflessly benevolent, she was also stubborn, hot-tempered, sharp-tongued, and edgy. Some Howe biographers have suggested that she had a mental illness. In 1859, her parents thought she was having a breakdown from overwork. Before her marriage, she had certainly had bouts of depression, and in the summer after Chev’s death, she was unable to sleep or return to her home; Julia called a doctor, who diagnosed hysteria, a catchall term that had unreliable and gendered meanings in the nineteenth century. None of these details is certain evidence of mental illness. What is clear about Julia Romana is the extraordinary degree to which she both emulated and competed with her parents. Like Chev, she was devoted to the care of the blind and to serving as “the patron saint of the Perkins Institution,” in Maud’s phrase.34 Like Julia, she was a poet; her book Stray Chords was published in 1883. Like her mother as well, she was passionate about philosophy and had started a Metaphysical Club where thinkers could share discussions; she ruled it, her mother wrote, “with a staff of lilies.”35 Julia Romana was also an enthusiastic participant in Bronson Alcott’s Concord School of Philosophy, funded by his daughter Louisa, and host to the Transcendental great and good. Howe herself had lectured there in 1881. In Philosophiae Quaestor (1884), Julia Romana both paid tribute to the school and satirized its sages, posing as “a dumb Dante” unable to understand everything she heard. On the other hand, she shared very few interests with her sisters, and could be very snippy about them in her letters; they also knew that she had been Chev’s favorite, “the first born, the star child, the nearest to his great heart of all his children.”36
Julia’s dreams of her oldest daughter were guilty and remorseful for months. In June she dreamed of a conversation with Julia Romana speaking to her through the sitting room clock. “Dearest Dudie, why can I not feel that you are near me?” she asked the spirit, who replied, “because you do not care about it.”37 Another dream in August had Julia Romana complaining that her family did not talk about her very often.38 In November, she saw Julia Romana again, and asked, “oh, darling, why don’t you come oftener?” to which the ghost gave no clear reply but seemed more cheerful.39 In her deep mourning, Laura wrote to Annie Mailliard, “Mama is very beautiful. Her hair is quite snow-white now, the black bonnet and veil showing the perfect features as if carved in ivory.”40 Gradually, Julia’s unconscious projections of a reproachful Julia Romana subsided.
Her wishes for Maud to marry came true at last. At thirty-two, Maud finally decided to relinquish girlhood. Jack Elliott was not perfect: he had no profession and no income, and her sisters might not approve of him, but he was persistent and she loved him. “You will be surprised and I fear a good deal troubled,” Maud wrote to Laura, “to learn that Jack has come out again, bent on marrying me, and seems likely to carry his point this time. I am sorry that you can’t be glad, so please don’t bother to write me anything about it for you couldn’t write from your heart and I should feel the effort you would make to say something kind. Only wait until you see him and don’t burden your heart or Harry’s against him. He isn’t a little black beast, he is a true-hearted creature, the only man who has ever really loved the best me. I am full of peace and hope, and the black gulf seems to be all shut over and gone.”41 Julia had always liked him, and was genuinely glad. Boston society, in the person of Jack Gardner, saw the match as a comedown. “I am disgusted, because he hasn’t a copper,” wrote Mr. Jack. “He is an Englishman, a painter, and has lived most of his life in Rome . . . He hopes to get work—house decoration if nothing better offers.”42 On February 7, 1887, Maud and Jack married at 241 Beacon Street with James Freeman Clarke officiating. They had designed an arty altar of laurel and palms, and she wore a sophisticated satin gown and a tulle veil. It was a pretty wedding, according to Mr. Jack, and Maud received many presents, although “neither so numerous or so handsome as they ought to have been, nothing like what they would’ve been if she had been or married rich.”43 They went to New York for a short honeymoon, and soon moved to Chicago, where she became an expert on American art and a fixture of high society. She also made frequent visits to Boston and Newport.
With Maud more or less settled, Julia launched into a new round of lecturing and preaching. She led prayer services at the Home for Intemperate Women in Boston. She read the “Battle Hymn” at Longfellow’s memorial service at the Boston Museum. There she had to meet Lowell and Norton, although the nasty review for which she blamed them still rankled; she had “long felt an unkindness for the disrespect with which they treated or allowed to be treated my Later Lyrics in the North American Review.” With the feminist perspective of the women’s movement, however, she speculated that their disrespect was less personal than patriarchal. “Lowell has never had any opinion of women as poets,” she thoughtfully added. “He once told me so.”44
Another return to the past came in December 1887 when she presided over a celebration of Laura Bridgman’s fiftieth year at Perkins. There were songs, flowers, and a Christmas tree decorated with gifts, including a gold bracelet and a music box. Laura was much moved by the attention. At the end of the festivities, however, Michael Anagnos made an unexpected announcement: Perkins was teaching two new deaf-blind girls, nine-year-old Edith Thomas and seven-year-old Helen Keller. He had discovered Helen Keller earlier that year, when her parents (who had read Dickens’s account of Laura Bridgman in American Notes) wrote to him asking for a teacher for their gifted but untamed daughter at their Alabama home. Like Chev in the 1830s, Anagnos, who had just turned fifty, was ambitious and craving an opportunity to make his own mark. He had long been hoping to find a Laura Bridgman of his own, and he sent his top Perkins student, Annie Sullivan, to Alabama as her teacher. When he went there to meet Helen in March 1888, he realized that she had already surpassed Laura in intelligence, quickness of mind, beauty, and charm. In May 1888, Keller and Sullivan came to Perkins for six months of training.
The much-anticipated meeting of Laura and her eager young successor, however, was a tragicomic disaster. As an elderly woman, Laura Bridgman was obsessive about cleanliness and skittish about being touched. Keller thought she was “like a statue I had once felt in a garden, she was so motionless, and her hands were so cool, like flowers that have grown in shady places.”45 Laura scolded little Helen about her rough way of playing; then, trying to kiss Laura good-bye, Helen accidentally tromped on her toes.
Laura died at Perkins the following year. Her eulogists tended to focus on Chev’s achievement, not hers. At her funeral, her minister spoke of Chev as “one of those knights errant of the middle ages, possessed of all their chivalry, setting himself down before some castle whose triply-barred gate refused him entrance, and then laying siege until the gate was forced and the imprisoned captive released.”46 The image confuses the captive and the castle, and attributes the whole triumph to the knight’s assault, ignoring the girl’s own struggle to overcome her handicaps. It was a perfect epitaph for Chev, if not for Laura. In any case, from then on, Michael Anagnos and Annie Sullivan would be the chivalrous heroes, and Helen Keller the beautiful emancipated princess.
The Howes were uneasy with the new Perkins regime. Maud went to Michael Anagnos’s annual reception in 1893 and was not impressed by his “main attraction,” Helen Keller and her teacher, Annie Sullivan. “I think Anagnos has made a mistake in choosing Miss Sullivan for her teacher. Miss S. is well prepared in one way, having herself been educated at the Perkins Institution and having known Laura Bridgman and become familiar with Papa’s methods, but she has not the right feeling, remembering the beautiful modesty of Laura’s behavior, compared to the almost hoydenish ways of this child. Helen recited some verses . . . The loneliest sound I have ever heard, like waves breaking on the coast of some lonely desert island.”47Maud and Flossy defended their father’s legacy in their biography Laura Bridgman: Dr. Howe’s Famous Pupil and What He Taught Her (1903).
Julia thought the fuss over Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan was exaggerated, but she had let go of the Perkins legend. She had started reading again—daring young women poets such as Louise Guiney, whose feminist “Tarpeia” she found puzzling. She went to a lecture on the “new poetry” and found it very interesting except that the speaker “overpraised Walt Whitman, as some of us thought.” And she was on the move. In 1889 she visited Kansas and saw the land Chev had bought before the war, in Grasshopper, Lawrence, and Burlington. An old Kansas farmer told her that “Grasshopper is a fine place and that eighty acres of our land are splendid farming land”; but the taxes were high, so she sold it. In Topeka, legislators came to her talk, and one suggested she might run for the US Senate.48 She went cross-country by Pullman, lecturing from Chicago to St. Paul, to Spokane, Walla Walla, Tacoma, Seattle, and Portland, arriving in San Francisco on May 5. On Decoration Day she was the guest of honor at the Grand Opera House, where the whole audience stood to sing the “Battle Hymn” and “the lady cornetist came in with a good blast.” She also went to visit Annie in California, and was entranced by the Mailliard ranch and the orange poppies on the lawn. “The middle west seems to me nowhere now that I have seen the real west,” she enthused.49
At the end of May, Maud and Laura organized a gala festival for their mother’s seventieth birthday, inviting friends and dignitaries including Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, Mrs. Jack, and Edward Everett Hale, who “left too soon to do anything.”50 This party was the first of what Valarie Ziegler calls the “public rituals of veneration” from the 1890s until her death. Her birthday became an annual commemorative event. The New England Woman’s Club hosted a lavish luncheon; the Boston Authors Club commissioned a volume of poems for her eightieth birthday; on her ninetieth birthday, a speaker compared the elevator installed at Beacon Street by her children to a “heavenly chariot lifting her to the regions above.”51
Although Maud and Jack lived in Chicago, Flossy and her children in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, and Laura with her large family in Maine beginning in 1876, the daughters were determined to take over Chev’s role as Julia’s supervisor. The granddaughters too kept track of her travels and tried to persuade her to stay home. In 1890, Laura’s daughter Rosalind Richards moved to Boston to help her grandmother, but also to keep an eye on her activities. “Grandmama went to Philadelphia today; but is coming back tomorrow,” she reported to Laura. “Why, of course!” Laura replied, “Just stepping across the street to Philadelphia! What could be more simple?”52 Maud kept up her exhortations from a distance. “I beg of you, for all our sake, and your own, not to keep up the racket which everyday since I left you have carried on. In six weeks you went once to Washington, three times to New York, once to New Haven . . . Is there nothing worthwhile in life but the platform and the public? . . . I don’t want you to hold your hands in your lap, but neither can I endure your constant and exhausting wanderings.”53 They nagged, complained, remonstrated, pleaded; but Julia would not be stopped and could fight back sharply when they pushed too hard. “The past year, which is so much deplored by some of you,” she wrote to Laura, “has been to me unusually rich in instruction and in satisfaction, and I cannot say that I find any occasion to regret any of its’ [sic] outings . . . I must make a stand for freedom to do the work which, humanly speaking, I cannot hope to do very much longer. I have said my word, and so, let us kiss and be friends, and say no more about it.”54
Behind this defiant front, Julia felt discouraged for much of the 1890s. She thought her writing life was over. Although in 1895 she published a collection of essays, Is Polite Society Polite?, the sales were disappointingly low. “I cannot comfort myself as I once could,” she wrote to Laura, “by thinking that I am above the level of the general public. Clearly my writings don’t interest them.” Laura wanted to publish a collection of her poems, but Julia could not imagine “another dead book.”55 By the close of the decade, both of her sisters had died: Annie in April 1895, Louisa in October 1897 in Rome, where she was buried in the Protestant Cemetery.
Julia was still feeling posthumous and passé in December 1897, when Maud and Jack persuaded her to spend the winter with them in Rome at the beautiful Palazzo Rusticucci overlooking St. Peter’s Square. The visit started badly: “The first day of this winter, which God help me to live through! Dearest Maud is all kindness and devotion to me, and so is Jack, but I have Rome en grippe. Nothing in it pleases me.”56 Her despondency hung on for a time, but the Atlantic Monthly had requested her memoirs, and she was attempting to write them despite her depression: “I fear that my ‘Reminiscences’ will be very disappointing to the world in general, if it ever troubles itself to read them. I feel quite sure that it has neglected some good writing of mine in verse and prose. I cannot help anticipating for this book the same neglect and this discourages me somewhat.”57
Once she had established a work schedule, however, she could not stay depressed for long. The house was magnificent, tiled in red, white, and black geometrical designs, and the grand salon had a sixteenth-century carved wooden ceiling and pale green doors. Marion Crawford had loaned the Elliotts furniture; and Jack had turned to gardening, partly to procrastinate and avoid work on his endlessly deferred commission to paint a mural, The Triumph of Time, for the Boston Public Library.58Red, white, and yellow roses, plus urns of azaleas, honeysuckle, chrysanthemums, and geraniums bloomed on the terrace. They saw Duse perform in several plays including D’Annunzio’s Primavera (“a rotten piece,” in Maud’s view), and went to receptions, luncheons, tea parties, dinners, galleries, drives, and concerts.59 Julia perked up and organized a “small and select” women’s literary club of Romans and Anglo-American expatriates. She bought a little diamond ring set in black enamel and thought about buying a small ruby-and-diamond ring as well.60
Yet as she was writing her reminiscences, Rome was full of memories and echoes of her past, and haunted by the specters of her youth. Jack had hung passion-flower vines along the walls, which reminded her of Horace Binney Wallace and her poems. Her dreams were unusually rich and reflective. In January, she had “a singular dream, very distinct. I thought that my death was very near, although I was not ill. People seem to be expecting it. I found my watch badly injured and thought, ‘it is not worthwhile to repair it, as I shall have no further use for it.’ ”61 In March, she dreamed that her father “came in and said to me that he wished to speak to Miss Julia alone. I trembled, as I so often did, lest I was about to receive some well merited rebuke. He said that he wished my sister and me to stay at home more.”62
In the midst of these visitations, Julia found herself returned to youth in another way. Jack Elliott, working from photographs and his imagination, painted a “strange, half allegorical portrait” of her in the 1850s, in which she holds a water lily.63 In Rome, he began designing her clothes. Julia had always loved clothes and jewels, and Louisa had sent her elaborate dresses from Paris in the 1840s and 1850s. But Jack Elliott created a style for her that brought out her beauty as she grew older: distinctive, layered, elegant striped or patterned silk dresses, topped with embroidered jackets, and finished with magnificent lace collars. He banished black dresses; under his guidance she wore green and lilac, and a beautiful white cashmere dress, “made something like the Pope’s robe.”64
In her pretty, artistic dresses, Julia was a surprising social and aesthetic star. All spring the artists in Rome were clamoring for her services as a model. She sat for a portrait by Jose de Villegas, the leader of the Spanish art colony, who had mentored Jack; and a bust by Hendrik Andersen, a strikingly handsome young sculptor, who had been born in Norway, grew up in Newport, and had settled in Rome.65 Indeed, to Maud’s delight, her elderly mother was sought after as a sitter. “People talked so much about her appearance” that her niece Daisy Chanler told her, “I am always prepared for fresh surprises from you, but I had not expected this succès de beauté.”66
After Julia had returned to Boston, Maud told her great friend Henry James, a regular guest at the Palazzo, about her mother’s second blossoming. As James recorded the conversation, he had been chatting with Maud on the flowered terrace “of her charming place near St. Peter’s . . . with such a view,” when she told him about Julia’s “coming out at the end of her long, arduous life, and having a wonderful unexpected final moment—at 78!—of being thought the most picturesque, striking, lovely old (wrinkled and marked) ‘Holbein,’ etc. that ever was. ‘All the artists raving about her.’ ” James wrote it down in his notebook as the germ of a short story about a “little old ugly, or plain (unappreciated) woman, after dull, small life, in ‘aesthetic,’ perceptive, ‘European’ ‘air.’ ”67 He published the resulting story, “The Beldonald Holbein,” in Harper’s Magazine in October 1901; in it, the exquisitely preserved Lady Beldonald is chagrined when her poor and plain companion becomes the toast of discriminating London. While Julia was neither unappreciated nor plain, acclamation in her late seventies as a princess hidden in the palace was a triumph.
Reminiscences came out in 1899. It concluded with Julia’s summary of her life’s successes:
It was a great distinction for me when the foremost philanthropist of the age chose me for his wife . . . I have sat at the feet of the masters of literature, art, and science, and have been graciously admitted into their fellowship . . . I have written one poem which, although composed in the stress and strain of the Civil War, is now sung South and North by the champions of a free government . . . Lastly and chiefly, I have had the honor of pleading for the slave when he was a slave, of helping to initiate the woman’s movement in many States of the Union, and of standing with the illustrious champions of justice and freedom, for woman suffrage, when to do so was a thankless office, inviting public ridicule and private avoidance.68