Mark Twain in the Company of Women - Hardcover

Skandera-Trombley, Laura E

9780812232189: Mark Twain in the Company of Women

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812232186 ISBN 13: 9780812232189

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994

The field of Mark Twain biography has been dominated by men, and Samuel Clemens himself - riverboat pilot, Western correspondent, silver prospector, world traveler - has been traditionally portrayed as a man's man. The publication of Laura E. Skandera-Trombley's Mark Twain in the Company of Women, however, marks a significant departure from conventional scholarship. Skandera-Trombley, the first woman to write a scholarly biography of Mark Twain, contends that Clemens intentionally surrounded himself with women, and that his capacity to produce extended fictions had almost as much to do with the environment shaped by his female family as with the talent and genius of the writer himself. Women helped Clemens to define his boundaries, both personal and literary. Women shaped his life, edited his books, and provided models for his fictional characters. Clemens read and corresponded with female authors, and often actively promoted their careers. Skandera-Trombley seeks to combine a biographical study of Clemens's life with his beloved wife, Olivia (Livy) Langdon, and their three daughters, Susy, Clara, and Jean, with new readings of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. Several crucial areas are investigated: the nature of Clemens's family participation in his writing process, the degree to which their experiences as women during the mid- and late nineteenth century affected his writing, and the extent to which the loss of his family may have impeded and ultimately ended his ability to write lengthy narratives. Skandera-Trombley points out that in marrying Livy, Clemens not only joined a family of substantial means, but also entered one active in thesuffragist, abolitionist, and other reformist movements, which had deep roots in the progressive community of Elmira, New York. Mark Twain in the Company of Women will be of interest to Twain scholars and readers as well as students in American studies, women's studies, nineteenth-cen

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Review:

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Book of the Year "[This book] supports a valuable idea, that Samuel Langhorne Clemens's relationships with women and with feminism contributed to his creative life to an unmistakably large extent. . . . Skandera-Trombley unearths a stunning array of material on the intersection of nineteenth-century American feminism and the nineteenth century's most important literary figure."--Nineteenth-Century Literature "This book is to be applauded for its ambition, for its revisioning of the positive power of the 'company of women' on Clemens's career, and for its careful and revealing historical research."--American Historical Review "Mark Twain in the Company of Women explores the key role women played in Mark Twain's life as a writer, probing the ways in which women nurtured, shaped, and, indeed, made possible some of Twain's most lasting creative achievements. This fascinating, fresh, and well researched study fills in a number of important gaps in Twain scholarship, and merits the attention of anyone interested in the man and his art."--Shelley Fisher Fishkin, University of Texas, Austin

From the Author:

Mark Twain, Women and Huckleberry Finn: A Potent Cocktail!!
Mark Twain in the Company of Women resulted from an adventure I embarked upon involving 100 original Twain letters that mysteriously reappeared after an absence of over 80 years.The Clara Letters, as they've come to be called, heralded a new era of Twain biography (not to mention that the lucky buyer sold them for a quarter of a million dollars at auction).In my book, for the first time the people most important to Twain, the women in his family, are discussed in relation to Twain's emotional life and his writing.My biography has won a Choice award for excellence and has been widely reviewed. LS-T

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