Biographical Overview

Abstract Having accumulated a quantity of material during his 1897 European sojourn, Howells planned to rework his recent travels into literary form, which would take the shape of Basil and Isabel March’s twenty-fifth-anniversary sequel to Their Wedding Journey. Provisionally entitled “The Discovery of Europe,” this work signaled Howells’s return to a field–the “international”–he had long since surrendered to James. With a salesman’s bravado, he told the editor of Harpers Magazine (while asking for more “elbow room”–and substantially more money), “I hope to make it so light, new, and gay, so unique in conception and execution, that it will be successful, and that you will wish to continue it as long as I shall.”1 The waters at Carlsbad may not have cured him of anything else, but Howells was soon disabused of this optimism. Returning to his “early method of mixing travel and story” proved hazardous, as he told James. Getting the right start was especially troublesome; once under way, however, the book became diffuse and unmanageable. Critics have justifiably ignored this novel (when they have not dismissed it), but an author’s failures still can speak to us if we ask the right questions of them. Why, contrary to all his expectations, should this book have been so difficult for Howells to write? Perhaps because, unlike any other, it betrays acute symptoms of the anxiety of influence.