Mark and Livy the Love Story of Mark Twain and the Woman Who Almost Tamed Him - Hardcover

Willis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0689121547 ISBN 13: 9780689121548

Publisher: Scribner, 1992

Synopsis

Presents the details of Mark Twain's often overlooked marriage to Olivia Langdon Clemens--a splendid woman who was his constant critic, companion, editor, muse, and trusted advisor.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Mark Twain is America's best-known and perhaps most popular writer. But until now little has been known about the love of his life--Olivia Langdon Clemens, his adored "Livy". In Mark and Livy, Resa Willis has redressed this oversight, presenting us with the fullest insights and details of four decades of courtship and marriage, showing us a famous writer at home and at work, and the splendid woman who was his consistent critic and companion, editor and muse, trusted advisor and beloved wife. The daughter of a prominent, wealthy, and broad-minded family--they were founding members of the local Congregational Church, abolitionists, and helpers on the underground railroad--in upstate New York, Olivia Langdon was just twenty-two when she and Samuel Clemens first met at Christmastime in 1867. (In his autobiography, he would later claim that he had seen her before--in a photograph owned by her brother, whom Clemens had befriended on his trip to the Holy Land--and fallen in love at first sight.) A lifelong diarist, reader, and commentator on her own readings, Livy at first resisted his courtship, but soon she relented, providing Clemens with the "sivilizing" influence that he craved, even as he thought himself unworthy, and that made life possible for him as he composed the books that made his fortune and reputation. As an adolescent Livy had suffered from a mysterious paralysis, all too common to her times and class, and while never completely robust thereafter, she brought a remarkable concentration of energy and strength, sensitivity and love to her many-sided life as a proper Victorian wife, proving herself to be, as Professor Willis makes abundantly clear, the vital center of the Clemensfamily. Whether amidst the dazzle of their cosmopolitan social world or the private and protected life of home--in Buffalo, Elmira, Hartford, New York, or the various flats and villas of their shared life abroad--there was Livy, blue-penciling her husband's manuscripts, overseeing the music lessons of one daughter, the illnesses of another, befriending, soothing, and charming all who met her. (On her death, William Dean Howells said, "She hallowed what she touched, far beyond priests".). A story of heady successes and heartbreaking tragedies, Mark and Livy is a story that needed to be told, and in Resa Willis it has found the perfect writer--vigorous, sympathetic, humorous, and clear-sighted. Drawing extensively on Livy's own diaries, letters, and commonplace books, her portrait is suffused with Livy's true voice and emotional depth--it is a triumph of the biographer's art.

Reviews

Olivia Langston (1845-1904) married Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) in 1870 and remained his wife for 34 years. In line with the conventions of the times, she saw herself as a wife, mother and "tamer" of iconoclastic Twain. However as Willis, literature professor at Drury College in Missouri, points out in this carefully researched, readable biography, Langston was also his valued critic and editor. In humorous anecdotes Twain portrayed "Livy" as a shrew--but the relationship between the mild-mannered, self-effacing woman and the cantankerous literary genius was apparently one of deep commitment and love. Their affection for one another, claims Willis, saw them through the rise and fall of their financial fortunes, the death of their daughter and Livy's many illnesses. The author's access to letters and journals gives insight into both husband and wife, as well as providing a portrait of American domestic life in the late 1800s.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Twain's domestic years (1870-1904) were not what he considered his best. But in spite of illness and financial stress, they were the years when he wrote the novels and stories he is remembered for--works that, according to Willis (Literature/Drury College) in this slight and sentimental story, were edited and inspired by Olivia ``Livy'' Langdon, Twain's wife, whom he called ``angel'' and ``gravity.'' Recovering from ``neurasthenia,'' a form of weakness that afflicted upper-class, intellectually repressed Victorian women, Livy entered a ``classic'' marriage as the ``civilizing'' influence on a hard-drinking, smoking, swearing, sociable dreamer who liked to travel. She decorated his homes, entertained his friends, toured Europe and the world with him as he lectured and wrote, and provided the fortune that allowed them to live so well on an editor's salary--a fortune he lost on the ill-fated Paige typesetting machine. Livy also bore four children: a son who died in infancy and three emotionally crippled daughters, also tamed in odd ways--at age four, the oldest was ``whipped'' daily in the bathroom with a ``hairbrush or papercutter.'' Although Livy's dark side--her elitist, tyrannical, and repressive nature--is obvious, the love story Willis claims to offer is not. Rather, there is a record of holidays (not very festive), expenses, travels, domestic chores, visits, visitors, griefs, and all possible illnesses--from pinkeye to epilepsy--and the medical foolishness with which many of them were treated. The best story, only implicit here, is not the taming of Mark but the liberation of Livy, the adventure of being Mrs. Clemens, especially the lecture tour around the world with all the bizarre escapades in Fiji, Tasmania, Africa, and India, lovingly related in Following the Equator, a Twain work that does not even appear in Willis's bibliography, with the voyage itself squeezed between Twain's carbuncles and daughter Susy's death. (Two eight-page photo inserts--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0689121547
• ISBN 13: 9780689121548
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352