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Howells, daughter of novelist William Dean Howells, experienced years of nervous illness before her early death under the care of the notorious S. Weir Mitchell. Speculation regarding her death has lent her a small but persistent role in scholarship. Her poetry, though, has been largely ignored or read as symptoms of despair and decline.
Analysis (ai): "Forthfaring" by Winifred Howells presents a shift in perspective as the speaker embarks on a new path. The poem begins with a sense of complacency, as the speaker gathers familiar flowers.
Winifred Howells (1863-1889) Winifred's father, the realist novelist William Dean Howells, was one of the most influential editors of the day. He edited The Atlantic Monthly after James Fields died. Thus Winifred and her younger sister Mildred, also a poet, grew up in the heart of literary Boston.
2 March. Winifred Howells dies of heart failure. Hoping to cure his daughter Winnie's persistent and mysterious illness, Howells puts her under the care of Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, originator of the "rest cure" made famous in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper."
Howells declined into a lasting neurasthenia similar to the more celebrated invalidism of her friend Olivia Clemens. Most harrowing of all, Winifred Howells died in March, I889, while under the specialist's care of S. Weir Mitchell, America's leading pre-Freudian alienist, who believed with other physicians that her malady was psychosomatic.
Jan 1, 2021 · Winifred Howells Thomas Bailey Aldrich to Winifred Howells, May 25, 1885, MS Am 1784.7 (1), Howells Family Papers, 1850-1954, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
William Dean Howells ( / ˈhaʊəlz /; March 1, 1837 – May 11, 1920) was an American realist novelist, literary critic, and playwright, nicknamed "The Dean of American Letters". He was particularly known for his tenure as editor of The Atlantic Monthly, as well as for the novels The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Traveler from Altruria, and the ...
