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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 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). ' 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...