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Hungry Heart: The Literary Emergence of Julia Ward Howe.
Among Julia Ward Howe's pre-Civil War writings, her "Laurence manuscript" an unpublished novel about a hermaphrodite, most strikingly confirms Gary Williams's analysis of a remarkable friendship between the poet's husband Dr. Samuel Howe and four-term Senator from Massachusetts Charles Sumner. Hungry Heart: The Literary Emergence of Julia Ward Howe is a literary biography that explodes conventional wisdom about the lyricist of "Battle Hymn of the Republic." Williams argues that the conciliatory bride became a vengeful wife when she tried to come to terms with what he carefully articulates as a striking intimacy between her husband and his friend. Black and white illustrations of the Howes, Julia's friends, and hermaphrodite figures Julia likely saw in Rome, as well as fifty-three pages of notes, support this strong reading. I enjoyed Williams's wonderfully literary treatment of what still to some are not very literary texts, and he provides a model of archival research and scholarly synthesis that should be repeated for many nineteenth-century women poets. Yet sometimes his "relentless impulse to autobiographize" (150), as even Williams characterizes his focus on Howe's response to her husband and Sumner's relationship, tends to preclude possible alternate readings of her...