Elliott, Maude Howe

views updated

ELLIOTT, Maude Howe

Born 9 November 1854, South Boston, Massachusetts; died 19 March 1948, Newport, Connecticut

Wrote under: Maude Howe

Daughter of Samuel G. and Julia Ward Howe; married John Elliot, 1887

Maude Howe Elliott was born at her father's Perkins Institute for the Blind in South Boston and grew up in the midst of the literary and reform worlds of Boston, with Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Florence Nightingale, and John Brown as family friends.

After two years of publishing short stories, travel notes, and art reviews in the popular press, Elliott published A Newport Aquarelle in 1883. She often used travel as inspiration and setting for her works, producing San Rosario Ranch (1884) after a trip to Southern California, Atalanta in the South (1886) after a stay at the New Orleans Cotton Centennial, and a series of travel books after several European trips. Elliott also wrote a syndicated letter for several American papers during her European travels of 1894-1900 and 1906-1910. She was active in the suffrage movement as president of the Newport Woman Suffrage Association.

Elliott's first novel, A Newport Aquarelle (1883), was published anonymously as part of the Roberts Brothers' No Name Author series. The novel establishes what was to become the pattern of Elliott's novels: a young woman without female relatives to raise and advise her finds herself caught between two suitors, one a struggling artist sensitive to the heroine, and the other a dandy who covets the heroine's fortune. An older woman enters the scene to guide the heroine, and the outcome is almost as predictable as the plot: the heroine marries the artist, or, rejected by him, she pines away.

Margaret Ruysdale, heroine of Atalanta in the South, (1886) is a stranger from the North. A sculptor, she is as hard of heart as the Atalanta she creates, a "maiden, in whose veins flowed the pure cool blood of the Puritans." The Southern setting is important to the novel, as Elliott uses it to initiate her judgments of the South and of the Civil War ("a mistake"). Margaret's two suitors are Dr. Philip Rondelet, a soft-spoken physician, gentle to women, composed of "the stuff of which martyrs are made," and Robert Feuardent, a passionate Creole. In a complicated subplot of murder, intrigue, and secret marriages, Philip is accused of murder; when acquitted, he leaves New Orleans to help fight the plague in nearby Thebes. Like her own Atalanta, Margaret is caught by the fruit rolled at her feet by Robert. They marry at her family farm in New England. Philip dies of the plague shortly thereafter. Although Margaret's friends feel she made an unwise choice (Elliott's sympathies obviously lie with Philip), it is clear that by following her heart, Margaret Ruysdale has made the right choice.

Elliott's Art and Handicraft in the Woman's Building (1893) remains the definitive description of women's activities at the World's Columbian Exposition. In it, Elliott collected essays by Mrs. Potter Palmer, Julia Ward Howe, Candace Wheeler, and others describing all the exhibits in the building and the women's congresses held there. A history of women's participation in the World's Columbian Exposition is also included.

Elliott's biographies of her family are recognized as her best work. Life and Letters of Julia Ward Howe (1915), which she wrote with her sisters, Laura E. Richards and Florence M. Howe Hall, won the Pulitzer Prize. Her autobiographies Three Generations (1923) and This Was My Newport (1944) offer views of Newport society at the turn of the century.

Elliott's novels provide important insights into American women of the 19th century. She presents the strong and independent American girl on her own in society. Forced to depend on herself for moral guidance, Elliott's American girl is not completely sure of herself until she has met her mate. Elliott's ambivalence about independent women leads her first to exalt the freedom of self-sufficiency and then to deflate this freedom with doubts and insecurity. Elliott's resolution to this insecurity is invariably a loving marriage with a sensitive, artistic man.

Elliott's biographies of her remarkable family and her detailed description of women's activities at the World's Columbian Exposition are important contributions to American letters. As both a member and a chronicler of one of America's most important families, Elliott was aware of her role in history.

Other Works:

Phillida (1891). Honor (1893). The Story of Laura Bridgman, Dr. Howe's Famous Pupil; and What He Taught Her, with F. M. Howe Hall (1903). Roma Beata (1904). Two in Italy (1905). Sun and Shadow in Spain (1908). Sicily in Shadow and Sun (1910). The Eleventh Hour in the Life of Julia Ward Howe (1911). Lord Byron's Helmet (1927). My Cousin, F. Marion Crawford (1934). John Elliott, the Story of an Artist (1930). Uncle Sam Ward and His Circle (1938).