Julia Ward Howe

Leonardo Buonomo (Universita degli studi di Trieste)

Ed. by Emory Elliott, University of California, Riverside
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.6.1: Italian Writing and Culture, 453-present.
Vol. editors: Carla Bregman (Independent Scholar - North America), Jo Ann Cavallo (Columbia University)

Dates

Born 27 May 1819
Died 17 Oct 1910
Activity 1839-1910

Places

Born in United States
Active in Italy; United States

Activities

Primary

Poet
Rhetorician/ Orator

Other

Autobiographer
Lecturer
Playwright / Dramatist

Resources

Howe's Works

Save to Bookshelf

Julia Cutler Ward, poet and public speaker, was born in New York City into a prosperous and distinguished family. Her father was a wealthy banker. Her mother had been herself a published poet. In addition to formal schooling, Julia perfected her education at home, showing a remarkable talent for foreign languages and literatures. Thanks to her brother Sam, who had studied in Germany, young Julia had access to the writings of Goethe, Herder, Balzac, and George Sand, thereby attaining a level of instruction that few women of the antebellum United States could match.

Julia's father exercised firm control over his children's lives, and Julia early on showed signs of resistance to patriarchal authority and thirst for freedom which were to become the leitmotivs of her adult life and career. Yet

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

601 words

Citation: Buonomo, Leonardo. "Julia Ward Howe". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 04 April 2001 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2235, accessed 21 November 2024.]