Howells Turns to the Inner Life

Abstract

IN July of 1897, William Dean Howells and his wife set off for Europe, bound first for Carlsbad-where Howells would take the waters-and then for Holland for the after cure. Planning to convert his tour into literary material, he had promised Harper's Monthly a serialized travel story for 1899. This projected form, which he had largely evolved for himself and had used successfully in his earliest novels, Their Wedding Journey and A Chance Acquaintance, promised to be a congenial one. In the leisurely progress of his journey through Carlsbad, Nuremberg, Mainz, Dusseldorf, The Hague, Scheveningen, Paris, London, and Liverpool, he filled three pocket notebooks with his impressions of places, people, and events. He returned to New York in November 1897 and by January 18981 had begun work on what was eventually to become Their Silver Wedding Journey. But as he struggled with the composition of the travel novel he experienced a decided reaction against that genre itself. His dissatisfaction was not the passing whim of a day, and the self-scrutiny it provoked led him to recognize that his literary interest was shifting from the wvorld of scenery, events, and manners to that of inner life. This shift, which gave to his creative work of the next few years a different character from what it had in the 1890o's, is recorded in some of Howells' unpublished letters now in the Houghton Library at Harvard University.2 These letters also give a running, though sketchy, account of how two quite different novels split off from each