On June 12, 1850, Chev and Julia set off for their long-promised holiday in Europe. Chev had a few months’ leave from Perkins; Julia was planning to stay for a longer time with the Crawfords and the Mailliards in Rome. Harry and Laura, the youngest children, came with them, along with their beloved nurse Margaret MacDonald, whom Julia called “Donald,” and the children “Dee Dee.” Seven-year-old Julia Romana and six-year-old Flossy, however, were left behind with the family of Chev’s colleague Dr. Edward Jarvis, who ran a school for retarded children in his Concord home. Julia was more concerned that their nursemaid’s daughter, Fanny Jarvis, lived there too than she was about the other inhabitants; but she was so desperate to get away from Boston that she consented to the arrangement. Chev was a reluctant passenger, unhappy to leave his daughters behind and wishing he could disembark and go home when the ship made a stop in Nova Scotia. Leaving one’s children behind for long periods was not unusual in the nineteenth century; the Dickenses had done it when they came to America. Leaving some of the children behind and taking others, however, was more problematic, and Julia Romana and Flossy never completely forgave their mother for abandoning them.
They arrived in England in late June. In August, visiting the Nightingales in Derbyshire, they heard about Margaret Fuller’s death in a shipwreck off Fire Island on July 19; their ship may have crossed with hers in mid-ocean. Then they went to Paris to meet Thomas Crawford. Chev stuck it out for a while, and then dashed off in September to a spa at Boppard on the Rhine to try a new water cure. While he complained that the waters at Brattleboro were tastier and more effective than those at Bad Salzig, he admitted at the end of his stay that his health was sufficiently improved to allow him to “eat my weight in anything edible, climb the steepest crags, and warm up a wet sheet in a very few minutes.”1
On October 12, 1850, he went home to Boston aboard the Asia. A week later, although he would still have been at sea, Julia wrote anxiously to ask why he hadn’t written: “Your silence causes me great uneasiness,” she lamented.2 At last he wrote on October 27 about his arrival and reunion with their daughters, who were overjoyed to see him when he arrived at the Jarvis home and ran out to meet him. He said they were constantly kissing him and hanging on to him, unwilling to let him out of their sight or touch. Julia wrote immediately to tell the girls how much she missed them, and with what sadness she dreamed of them; but an affectionate Papa in their hands was worth much more than an undependable Mama sending guilt-ridden letters from across the ocean. The competition between the parents for their children’s loyalty was launched in that year, and Julia Romana and Flossy always felt closer to Chev, while Laura and Harry formed bonds with their mother and each other.
Julia and the rest of the clan had made it to Rome via Heidelberg in October. Thomas Crawford was doing very well financially; he had received a commission for an equestrian statue of George Washington, worth $52,000, and had bought a magnificent apartment in the Villa Negroni, surrounded by gardens of ilex and stone pines, roses, and many fountains. Julia was thrilled by the space, the luxury, the lack of restrictions, the absence of Chev. “After the privations entailed by maternity,” she wrote, “the weakness and physical discomfort, the inevitable seclusion, I found myself free and untrammeled . . . I was absolutely intoxicated with the joy of freedom and used to dance across the great salon in my sister’s apartment, singing ‘Liberty, Liberty!’ ”3
But to the horror of Louisa and Annie, and the shock of the Anglo-American community in Rome, she did not stay at the Villa Negroni for long. This was her first chance to live alone, and she did not want to let it slip away. She quickly found a suitable apartment in the Via Capo le Case close to the Trevi Fountain and the Piazza di Spagna, bought a grand piano, and settled in. As Julia described it to her family and friends back home, her Roman holiday was placid, domestic, respectable, and reassuringly dull. Her days were filled with the children and the company of neighboring American mothers, Mrs. Dudley Field downstairs and Mrs. Augusta Freeman upstairs. To top off this decorous routine, she took lessons in Hebrew from an aged Roman rabbi, who had to be back in the ghetto by six o’clock. Julia found him a wise man and Judaism a serious religion that, unlike the idolatrous Catholic monks around her, understood the “unviolable unity of God.” Still, he was no threat to Chev. Theodore Parker, however, regarded her studies as a waste of valuable time she could be devoting to her writing. He scolded her and urged her to devote herself in earnest to her work. “You have not merely talent for literature, but genius . . . and you—do nothing, nothing of much permanent value.”4
Rome was certainly easier and more pleasant than isolated South Boston and standoffish Old Boston. During the day, she went to the park with the children and met her neighbors for tea. The Crawfords had quickly become centers of the art colony in Rome, and at night Julia went to concerts, dinners, and private theatricals, playing Tilburina in Sheridan’s The Critic and Juliet (her favorite part) in a reading party. Even in Rome, of course, there were eyes and spies reporting on what she wore and how she behaved. At Christmas, Annie, over for yet another visit, saw Julia crying as she played the piano for the babies, and assumed that she was thinking about her festivities with all the children in Boston a year before, when she had trimmed their holiday tree.
On Christmas night, Louisa had a big party. She introduced Julia to an American traveler from Philadelphia, with the rhyming name of Horace Binney Wallace. Wallace was a graduate of Princeton, two years older than Julia. He had passed the bar in 1840 and practiced law for some years, but he was much more attracted to artistic and literary pursuits. Wallace kept his writing and publications secret, with many pseudonyms, which he frequently changed; his biographer calls him “a man of masks.”5 He was also a disciple of the French philosopher of science Auguste Comte, whose theory of positivism, and science replacing theology, became his creed. Wallace had no romantic history and was conspicuously unattached. For a while he had been a great friend of the sentimental poet Emily Chubbock, who wrote under the pseudonym Fanny Forrester. She described him as “a perfect gentleman; refined, high-bred, delicate, and manly. He is not handsome . . . but he has a very intellectual look, and a peculiarly sweet expression.”6 Julia commented on “the silvery timbre of his rather high voice.”
Wallace was a welcome addition to the small feminine circle Julia had built up over six months in Rome. He was a writer, and he took Julia’s writing seriously. Unlike Chev, he had nothing to do in Rome, no agenda, except to enjoy the city and look at pictures. He was available in a way no man in her life had ever been. Together they went to the Pantheon, the Tarpeian Rock, and the bridge of his namesake, Horatius Cocles. Every morning he bought her a bunch of violets in the plaza. With bright red hair, Wallace playfully advocated the innate superiority of the rosso; to Julia’s delight, he was always on the lookout for a new and remarkable specimen. As she recalled later, she loved shopping for jewelry and other odds and ends. “I was not then past the poor amusement of spending money for the sake of spending it. The foolish things I brought home moved the laughter of my little Roman public. I appeared in public with some forlorn brooch or dilapidated earring; the giddy laughed outright, and the polite gazed quietly. My rooms were the refuge of all broken-down vases and halting candelabra. I lived on the third floor of a modest lodging, and all the wrecks of art that neither first, second, nor fourth would buy, found their way into my parlor, and stayed there at my expense.” Wallace, she said, was amused by her scavengings, and “coming to talk of art and poetry, on my red sofa, sometimes saluted me with a paroxysm of merriment, provoked by the sight of my last purchase.”7
Julia became infatuated. Convinced that this engaging companion was the soul mate she had dreamed of, she built up a fantasy of their attachment. Wallace was the companion who had come to feed her hungry heart with his attention. Were they lovers? I am certain they were not. Julia would not have taken the risk, and her view of love was a meeting of minds, not a twining of bodies. Wallace was a restless aesthete with a history of depressive episodes; he was not interested in an affair, and he was certainly not as infatuated with her as she was with him. At the end of January, he took off for Naples and Greece, and stayed there until March. He returned to Rome for a few weeks, and then left Rome permanently to visit Comte in Paris. By April he had returned home to Philadelphia. Julia was left in the lurch in a romance that she was mostly imagining.
Her sisters, however, were worried about her behavior, her reputation, her marriage, and her future. On April 29, Annie wrote an extraordinary letter to Chev pleading with him to ask Julia to come home. Explaining that she was writing without Julia’s knowledge, she told him that Julia was miserable and lonely, needed his protection, and was on the brink of social catastrophe. If Chev would not act by the end of May to call her home, Annie would feel obliged to take Julia and the babies back to Bordentown, which would create a scandal for all of them. If she didn’t hear from Chev, she herself would persuade Julia to go home. Clearly, the Crawfords as well as the Mailliards had been talking about Julia’s situation, and Annie, who had become close to him, had been chosen to appeal to Chev. The letter was carefully phrased:
Julia is only anxious to do your bidding and I am sure that a little word from you, added to our entreaties, would bring pleasure to you both, dear Chevie—She is living very quietly with Donald, in some small apartments near us, and has devoted the winter to her children and her studies—But we all feel that it would be difficult for her to face another one so entirely alone and unprotected . . . Once on the other side of the ocean I have at least a home to offer her, should you still wish to prolong her absence—but here she must stand alone, and unprotected; save by her own virtue and dignity. Indeed I cannot tell you, dear Chevie, how much it would grieve me to leave her in such a position. I do not write at her request, nor shall I even tell her that I have done so—But I know that you will understand the motive which prompts me to trouble you.8
Annie’s supplicating tone suggests that there was reason to believe that Chev was now viewing the Roman stay as a break in the marriage, and wanted to punish Julia by casting her out and disgracing her. Louisa too disapproved of Julia’s behavior with Wallace, and her general disregard of Roman social mores. Later, Julia would write to Louisa, apologizing for her “eccentric habits of life” in Rome, and explaining that she had felt “cast adrift, and given up to the caprices of life.”9 Chev may also have heard gossip about Julia and Wallace to add to his anger and mistrust. Later he asked her to burn his letters from that year, and he burned hers. So there is no way to be sure what happened.
At all events, Chev must have come through and done the honorable thing, because Julia packed up and left Rome in August with the Mailliards. She had been away from her husband and oldest children for more than a year, and tasted independence and the pleasures of making her own schedule, making her own friends, cooking her own meals, with no one to complain about her inadequacies as a housewife, and no one to give her the silent treatment. When she left, she felt that Rome, not Boston, was her home, and America was “the place of exile.”10
Aboard the ship for a month, she passed the time reading, brooding about Wallace, and writing poems. In her memoir she recalled that “when others had retired for the night, I often sat alone in the cabin, meditating upon the events and lessons of the last six months. These lucubrations took the form of a number of poems, which were written with no thought of publication, but which saw the light a year or two later.”11 One was a long recollection of Rome, and of her joy in escaping home, where an unnamed “querulous voice” asked of every independent project “to what good end?” and “punctual duty” waited “with weapon duly poised to slay / Delight ere it across the threshold bound.” Now she was heading back to cross that threshold, and preparing herself for the worst.
Chev’s querulous voice did not greet her immediately when she returned to Green Peace early on a Saturday evening in September. He had not come to meet her at the pier, and she had made the long, dusty ride back on her own by coach. Dudie and Flossy came running out when she came up the path, hugged her fiercely, and chattered away about their activities, but her sour and critical account of their reunion is very different from Chev’s full-bodied emotional one. She barely recognized the pretty little girls she had left behind in these noisy, solid, rambunctious children, who had been allowed to play outside and say what they thought without regard to feminine propriety, and who spoke with Boston accents learned from the servants. She was instantly critical of their appearance and 'font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Cambria",serif;color:blue'>12 One might think that she could have stayed home with them if she cared so much about their fair skin. Considering how much she had resented the efforts her grandmother made to keep her from being freckled or tanned, especially the thick scratchy green veil that had hidden her face as a girl, Julia’s belated endorsement of pale feminine grace seems unwarranted at best. Of course, she was tired, and disappointed not to be welcomed home by Chev, and primed to blame him by her self-pitying shipboard meditations. Most of all, she had to unload her guilty feelings about leaving the girls for so long, in finding fault with them and with Chev’s parenting.
The news of her arrival was printed in the newspapers, and Boston society was watching closely to see what she would do. On September 3, Fanny Longfellow wrote to her sister, “Julia Howe has returned—I hear she was much admired in Rome and her soirees much courted. With her many resources of languages, music, and clever conversation, I can imagine how attractive she must have made them, where people love society for its own sake. How dull she will probably find it in South Boston, for she is not to be satisfied with the society of husband and children, and a social nature like hers really requires more not to consume itself.”13 Superficially complimentary, the letter was packed with barbs and innuendos. With her clever conversation, need for admiration, and un-Bostonian “social nature,” Fanny implied that Julia Howe was a peacock among the contented American chickens. Henry Longfellow ran into her on September 11 and noted in his journal that there was “a great sadness about her mouth.”14 The marital troubles of the Howes were no secret in Boston.
Julia recovered quickly from her first testy reactions and set herself to mending her relationship with Julia Romana and Flossy. I am “living very quietly at G.P.,” she wrote to Annie, “enjoying my children, my Swedenborg, and my nocturnal walks round the house, just as if I had never been away,—no, not as if I had not had the relief of a year of rest and absence. So far, my nerves are steadier and my temper more tranquil than of old.”15 As long as the weather stayed warm, Chev and Julia kept a sort of truce. In her absence, he had hired an efficient new housekeeper, Mrs. Stanwood, who handled everything. Julia didn’t like her; she never liked the women Chev hired for the house, whom she suspected of watching her and reporting her ineptitude to Chev. On the other hand, having someone else taking charge of the housework gave her time for study and writing. She was reading Comte’s Philosophie Positive, which Wallace had given to her. Following Comte’s recommendations of the study of science, she took up astronomy.
If Chev’s querulous voice was stilled, it was because he had other things on his mind. Like Julia, he too was facing separation from his dearest friends, the men who truly understood him. Horace Mann was heading to Ohio to become president of Antioch College. Worst of all, while Julia was in Rome in April 1851, Sumner was chosen by the Massachusetts General Court as the replacement for Robert Winthrop in the Senate. It had been a ferociously contentious election, which dragged on for three months and twenty-six ballots. Cornelius Felton and George Hillard had supported the Compromise of 1850 and were put off by Sumner’s vehemence on behalf of banning slavery in Kansas; the jolly Five of Clubs dinners were over, as the members split over abolition. When Julia came home, Sumner was getting ready to move to Washington and take his senatorial seat, and Chev was dreading their separation. A week before Sumner left, he was tormented by the thought that he would not be able “to get near you for comfort & sympathy when I am sad.”16 The reality was even worse than he had anticipated. Without Sumner to confide in, he was lonely and distraught. On December 6, he wrote, “I miss you, more even than I supposed I should. It makes me sad and almost sick at heart to think you are where I cannot reach you, be my need of sympathy ever so great.”17 And until the end of December, Julia was still nursing eighteen-month-old Laura, who shared her bed. Sexual abstinence was Julia’s preferred method of birth control, but after their long separation Chev felt deprived of all kindness and affection.
It is sad how desperately each of the Howes needed comfort, compassion, tenderness, and trust, and how little they were able to get from each other. Rather than admitting his feelings of loneliness, Chev retaliated for his exclusion from her bed by retreating to the library and working silently by himself in the evenings. On her side, Julia was annoyed by his withdrawal after her long day with the children and saw his silence as a punishment. She withdrew, too, into her studies and writing. In an undated poem from this period, she gave a bleak picture of their chilly life together:
Between us the eternal silence reigneth
The calm and separation of the tomb.
He did take on one project in December 1851 in which they could be partners: the editorship of The Commonwealth, a struggling small newspaper, highly polemical, which offended many with its fulminations against slavery and its promotion of the Free Soil Party. Cornelius Felton was so outraged by its “vulgarity, violence and insolence” that he canceled his subscription.18 Julia contributed an occasional column on the arts—lectures, plays, concerts—and her essays on George Sand and Uncle Tom’s Cabin gave her a chance to speak to a sympathetic audience throughout the next few years. The paper hung on until September 1854. Chev was also an active member of the Vigilance Committee in Boston, fighting against the notorious Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which commanded New Englanders to return runaway slaves to their “owners” in the South. He was transferring his attention and moral passions to the question of slavery, which would take over his life for the next fifteen years.
In March, Chev refused to accompany Julia to the theatre, considering it a waste of time; she was grateful to join the Longfellows when they attended. While she had been touchy about turning to “Longodingdongo” for judgments of her poetry and resented what she saw as his patronage, she began to be more at ease with him, trust him more, and consult him for advice about publishing her work. Another poet, Arthur Hugh Clough, came to Boston from England in the fall of 1852, sponsored by Emerson. Chev invited him to Green Peace, and Julia found him a cheerful addition to the household. Behind his boyish mask of joviality, though, Clough was a sharp observer of the Bostonian transcendentalists, ministers, and advanced women. His report of Julia for his male friends back home was that she dressed “so low that I’m always in terror lest she should come bodily up out of it, like a pencil out of a case.”19 He didn’t like her showy singing either; she was no “Diva” to him. To her daughters, however, Julia reigned over an idyllic home. Laura’s first recollection of her mother was “standing by the piano in the great dining room at Green Peace, in a black velvet dress, with her beautiful neck and arms bare, singing to us.”20
When summer came, Julia wrote to Louisa that she was getting better at coping with Chev’s coldness and irritability: “I acquired a little firmness and independence during my year of freedom, and no longer quiver at a cold look, or weep at a sharp word.”21 Then Annie was having another baby, and Julia spent two months with her while the children remained at Green Peace with Chev. No sooner did she leave for Bordentown than Julia Romana fell sick, and alarmed Chev with her expressions of guilt and remorse for imaginary sins. Religious self-castigation was Julia Romana’s way of explaining why her mother was always going away, and an expression of anger and resentment. This episode was an early sign of the depression that she increasingly displayed throughout her childhood and adolescence. It is possible that Julia saw Wallace in Bordentown. He had gone to Louisville when his sister Mary died in May 1852, and then returned to Philadelphia, close to the Mailliard estate.
Little Napoleon Mailliard was born in July, and in August, Julia, Annie, the Longfellows, and all the children went to Newport. They stayed in a boardinghouse near the beach called the Cliff House and enjoyed a holiday of parties, charades, and beach life. A photograph of the group shows Fanny Longfellow and Augusta Freeman, Julia’s upstairs neighbor in Rome, smiling in white summer dresses; Longfellow, buttoned up in a heavy black velvet-trimmed coat and a top hat at least a foot tall. Another visitor was Count Adam Gurowski, a radical journalist who had come to the United States from Warsaw in 1849. Gurowski, who had lost an eye in a duel, was a brilliant but eccentric aristocrat, noted for his rudeness and bad table manners, and a famous freeloader. He drove Sumner crazy by coming uninvited to his house, reading his newspapers, and staying until late at night. At communal dinners, he broke the crust of the chicken pie with his fist and ate it with his fingers but scolded the children for their bad table manners. Gurowski was such a pest that in Newport, one man hid in the loft and pulled the ladder up after him when the Count was in the neighborhood. It was Gurowski, though, who renamed Cliff House the Hotel de Rambouillet, after the seventeenth-century French salon of the bluestockings, and called Julia their Madame de Sévigné. Among Julia’s pleasures were charades and theatricals; she acted Juliet taking the sleeping potion, to great applause. Juliet, because of the name and the theme, remained her favorite Shakespearean role.
Chev came to join them towards the end of the month, but he was cranky and difficult, and shuttled back and forth between the Perkins Institution and Newport. Julia complained lightly of his behavior, but her indifference to his feelings is striking; she attributed his irritability to jealousy. As she recapped the vacation to Annie in October, “Chev’s sourness of disposition becomes so dreadfully aggravated by any success of mine. He was miserably sick every time he came to New Port, and fearfully cross—would not go out any where, and was strangely indignant at my enjoyment of society which was indeed very moderate.”22 Chev had some reason to be sour; Julia had been away for months, and he was bored by the idle society of Newport. Each of them, however, held the worst interpretation of the other’s behavior. They had not learned how to talk to each other.
On one of his solitary wanderings away from the beach, however, Chev decided on impulse to buy Lawton’s Valley, a small and dilapidated Newport farmhouse. He used Julia’s money to pay for it but put his own name on the deed. The house featured a lovely setting, with a brook Chev dammed up and redirected, and a picturesque old mill by a small waterfall. Over the next few summers, Julia made a studio for herself in a tiny attic room that held just a little pine table and a chair but had the great advantage of a heavy door. It was hot and buzzing with wasps, but in this room of her own, Julia could write as she pleased. After doing housekeeping and taking a morning walk, she went to her study to read and write. The children knew they must not interrupt her P.T.—her “precious time.” Edward Twisleton, a British friend who had been on their ship to London in 1850, came to visit in the early fall, and she enjoyed having him as a dinner guest; they shared literary interests.
In Chev’s kingdom of the blind, everyone seemed to complain of failing eyesight. That fall all of them were having eye problems. In September 1852, Wallace declared that his eyesight had completely broken down, and that he was unable to rest. He sought the advice of several doctors in Philadelphia; one grudgingly allowed that there might be “congestion of certain optic vessels at the base of the brain,” but another said there was nothing “the matter with his eyes at all.”23 Visual disorders could also be hysterical symptoms, physical ways of expressing psychological pain. Both Chev and Julia also suffered from eye problems. Julia always thought a northern light was responsible for her ocular afflictions, and indeed they both did a lot of reading and writing in poor light. Eye problems nevertheless seem like an apt metaphor of their problems of vision and insight.
Chev had long been a health fanatic, and in the fall he abruptly banned wine at parties. The Longfellows came for dinner in November and found to their dismay that they had only cold water to drink. “The Dr. does not mean to do his penance alone,” Longfellow wryly observed.24 Chev gave Julia permission to have her friends over for tea and whist, a concession she found belittling and condescending. “What an ass he must take me for!” she wrote indignantly to Annie. “Do you think that Giant Despair ever gave tea-parties?” She was feeling like Giant Despair, lamenting that “my books are all that keep me alive.”25
Adding to her depression was Wallace’s departure for Europe on November 8. He sailed on the Arctic from New York to Liverpool, headed to Paris, and took lodgings at the Bains de Tivoli, a hydrotherapeutic spa, under the care of a Dr. Bertin. On December 13, he went to visit Comte. He did not write to Julia, while she continued to write to him. A letter of January 7, 1853, from Boston shows how indiscreetly she had confided in him about her unhappy marriage: “I have been made happy by hearing that you are miserable in Paris . . . so anxious am I to have my best friend on the same side of the water with me again . . . It was so unkind of you to go and I miss you so much.” She especially missed his help with her book of poems. “I have felt often tempted to publish my poems, separately, this winter. Putnam’s New Monthly would do very well to bring them out, but I shall keep them all to myself, waiting for your advice.” She chided him for his failure to write. “You must not forget me. I am too lonely, too helpless, too orphaned to be deserted by you, my brother.” Wallace obviously knew about her unhappiness; she wrote that “I have been leading a very lonely and unsympathetic life ever since I came from New Port.” Her language is much like Chev’s to Sumner, and she emphasized her sadness in her self-characterization: “I am very thin and ugly this winter—this alone consoles me for being unseen of you. Farewell, my dear, dear friend—God bless you. Let me know when I may see you again. Glauko.”26 Wallace had called her Glaukopis, using the Homeric epithet for Athena in The Odyssey, meaning bright-eyed, and she had thought of using “Sybil Glauko” as a pen name. Chev had never given her a pet name. Calling herself Glauko was doubly significant; Wallace had praised her eyes, and unseen by him, she felt that she had lost her beauty and health.
She was unable to mail the letter, though, because she did not have Wallace’s address in Paris. When Annie came for her usual winter visit, Julia asked if the Mailliards could provide it. Annie turned away in tears. It was thus Julia learned that Wallace had committed suicide in Paris on December 16, 1852. He had cut his throat. Three days before, he had written to his brother John, imploring him to come to Paris. “I am exceedingly nervous . . . I have sometimes been in the deepest depression and alarm . . . Come if conveniently you can.”27 On the same day, his last social act had been to call on Comte and leave him the first deposit of an annuity.
Julia was devastated. “This sorrow departs not from me day or night,” she confided to Annie, “I always loved him but I did not know how much until I lost him.”28 To Louisa she wrote more guardedly. “Surely, surely he was insane. I believe it, and can almost fancy that I saw the elements of it in some of his ways . . . My sensibilities are much exhausted. I shed few tears for him—it was rather like having had a limb amputated while under the influence of Chloroform, and then waking and feeling the loss in the want.”29 Even Chev expressed sympathy for her. Before she knew that Wallace was dead, she had planned to look pretty again for his return, ordering a new wardrobe from Madame DuWavran near the Opera in Paris. When the packages arrived on January 22, including a gown in violet silk, another in white and gold, a third in green with three flounces trimmed in satin ribbons—she wanted only to wear black.30
Her feelings were intense, agitated, tumultuous, and confused. Only a few days before writing that calm letter to Louisa, she had composed a frantic letter to Comte, in French, ostensibly to ask for information about Wallace’s death, and reassurance about the immortality of his soul, but mostly for the relief of pouring out her feelings. It is an astonishing document. Never before or again would Julia reveal herself so openly:
You do not know me, and even my name can scarcely explain to you who I am. Allow me to tell you rather what I think I am. I need only use a name that will be dear and sacred for you as for me, to introduce myself to you as a friend, rather than as a stranger. This name is that of a person who informed me of your precious works—it is he who encouraged me to undertake the study of positivism, the science of sciences. It is to him I owe what I owe to you, sir. He was my adopted father, my support, my encouragement. He was, for he is now only a holy and precious memory. You will already have guessed, I hope, that I am speaking of Horace Binney Wallace, your ardent disciple, the one who, perhaps in all America, understood you best.
She told Comte about their friendship, which she cast as one between a mentor and devoted disciple:
I met him in Rome in the winter of ’50 and ’51. He found in me abilities too little disciplined, an imagination loving to exhaust itself, a genius without the corresponding study. I have an ardent temperament—I suffer and am happy to excess. Nature gave me the gift of poetry, which I have used rather to embellish my happiness and console my sorrow, than for a noble and reasonable purpose. I tossed off poems here and there, as a child tosses flowers—if someone picked them up, that was good, I was grateful—if they were left to perish, that did not bother me much. That is the way Horace saw my poems and took an interest in my studies. I was busy with the Hebrew Bible, which I enjoyed reading under the guidance of an erudite rabbi—I studied Swedenborg (I have studied a lot)—but at the same time, I went to balls, I danced, I sang, I gave dramatic recitations they still talk about in Rome. Horace followed me faithfully through this life, so agitated, so full of sensations. He finally made me understand that my life was not worthy of my talent—he begged me to cultivate the latter, to undertake studies that were more solid and more satisfying. I promised to do so.
Towards the end of the letter, she described the “dull calm” of her life in South Boston in despairing terms.
I live in a sad little country place, not far from a rather provincial town, whose society has few charms for me. No more music! No more of that electrifying thrill in the rapport of one soul with others. I make myself poorer than I am (I have enough to live in comfort) in order to be sober in all things—I make myself obscure in order not to shock other women, who, however, resent me and do not like me. My health is weakening—I exhaust myself struggling against the melancholy that consumes me. I am alas one of those exceptional women who can not relate [“do not love” has been crossed out] to their children—mine are very young, and charming, but I do not enjoy them as I would like to.
Of course she did not send the letter; it was not written to be sent. Yet she kept it among her papers.31
Bostonians did not know about Wallace, and she had no close women friends to confide in about her loss. That winter she gave up trying to make friends. “I cannot swim about in this frozen ocean of Boston life,” she complained to Louisa, “I feel as if I had struggled enough with it, as if I could now fold my arms, and go down.”32 From that point on, she became determined to publish a book of poems—partly as a memorial to Wallace, partly as solace for her grief. To both sisters, she lamented that without her books, without her poetry, without her project, life would be empty and unbearable. Over the next few months, the Book, as she called it, took on an increasingly powerful symbolism in her mind. As a first step, she submitted a poem called “Eloise and Abelard” to George Putnam for his monthly journal. She was furious when he rapidly sent it back, with a short letter saying that “people watch very narrowly the tone of his magazine” and “there were some lines in the poem which made it inexpedient to use it.” However tactless the letter, Putnam deserves credit for picking up on the throbbing emotion in the poetry. Julia was indignant in denial; how dare he imply that there was “some impropriety of thought or expression” in her writing? She considered penning a sharp reply called “How to Write for Putnam’s.”33
Chev, too, was working on a book. In May, it was rejected by James T. Fields, who wrote candidly that it was “too wordy and not welded together strong enough to hold the . . . public attention.”34 He must have been furious, but he probably didn’t share the news of his rejection with his wife.
Julia sent her manuscript to James Fields as well, and in the middle of October, Ticknor and Fields agreed to publish it anonymously. They must have seen that, unlike the Doctor’s essays, it would attract a lot of public attention. She spent the next several weeks revising her poems, and by the end of November had sought advice from Longfellow about further revisions and the title. All autumn, she wrestled with whether or not to tell Chev about the book. She was inclined to keep it a secret. As she wrote to Annie, “I have a great mind to keep the whole matter entirely from him, and not let him know anything until the morning the volume comes out. Then he can do nothing to prevent its sale in its proper form. Dear Annie, could one do this? he has known all summer that I intended publishing, and has made no objection, and not much comment.”35 Certainly Chev disapproved of women publishing, and had the power to prevent her from making her work public, and she also knew that he had little sympathy with poetry and little understanding of literary ambitions. In one sense, though, Chev’s lack of interest in poetry made it safer for her to go ahead with publication, and to convince herself that he would not understand the implications of her poems. In any case, it was important for Julia’s pride not to seek Chev’s permission to write or publish.
At last in December the proofs arrived, and checking them was unexpectedly taxing. She complained to Annie about it:
… the endless, endless plague of looking over these proof-sheets—the doubts about phrases, rhymes, and expressions, the perplexity of names, especially, in which I have not been fortunate. To-morrow I get my last proofs. Then a fortnight must be allowed for drying and binding. Then I shall be out, fairly out, do you hear? So far my secret has been pretty well kept. My book is to bear a simple title without my name, according to Longfellow’s advice. Longfellow has been reading a part of the volume in sheets—he says it will make a sensation. Chev knows nothing, as yet. I feel much excited, quite unsettled, sometimes a little frantic. If I succeed, I feel that I shall be humbled by my happiness, devoutly thankful to God. Now, I will not writeany more about it.36