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The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe: A Biography. By Elaine Showalter. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016, Pp. xiv, 303. $28.00.)
Occasionally, the life of an individual will span an era and converge with contemporary events and historical personalities in a way that opens a window on American history. Under those circumstances, the genre of biography is an apt vehicle to explore the intellectual, political, and social cross currents of an epoch of the past. The life ofjulia Ward Howe offers observers a wonderful glimpse of nineteenth-century American culture and society. Howe's life intersected with almost everyone who was anyone, at least in literary circles, in the United States and Western Europe during the 1800s. She did not always get along with these people; Showalter documents a running feud with Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning throughout the book. Still, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Auguste Comte, Louisa May Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and many more, walk through the pages of Showalter's book and Howe's life in fascinating fashion. With the number of literary personages chronicled and the poetry (and an unpublished novel) produced by...