Elliott, Maud Howe (1854–1948)

American novelist and historian. Name variations: Maud Howe. Born Maud Howe at the Perkins Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, on November 9, 1854; died at her summer home in Newport, Rhode Island, on March 19, 1948; daughter of Samuel Gridley Howe (founder of the Perkins Institute for the Blind) and Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910); sister of Laura E. Richards (1850–1943); attended the pioneer Kindergarten of America, established and taught by Elizabeth Peabody; married John Elliott (an artist), on February 7, 1887.

Maud Elliott and her sister Laura E. Richards received the first Pulitzer Prize for Biography (1917) for a 2-volume work on their mother, Julia Ward Howe, 1819–1910 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916). In her autobiography Three Generations, published by Little, Brown, in 1923, Elliott describes her childhood: "Looking back upon the first six or seven years of my life, I find myself in a dim enchanted land, which I have come to think of as 'The Twilight of the Gods,' for the figures that peopled it were, indeed, heroes and demigods. They drop easily apart into two groups, Mama's friends and Papa's friends. Mama's friends—we called them 'The Owls'—were poets, philosophers, and theologians, speculative men who sat long and discussed abstract things. Papa's friends were statesmen, soldiers, militant philanthropists, men of action whose time was too precious for long visits." Her mother's friends included Henry James the elder (while Maud grew up with the "James boys," Henry and Willie), Elizabeth Peabody , Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, Margaret Fuller , Maria Edgeworth , Florence Nightingale and "a host of others."

Maud Elliott was a correspondent for several newspapers and also wrote A Newport Aquarelle (1883), The San Rosario Ranch (1884), Atalanta in the South (1886), Mammon (1888), Two in Italy (Little Brown, 1905), Honor, and Phyllida. An inveterate traveler, she and her husband lived in Newport, Boston, Chicago, Rome, and Santo Domingo, while visiting Algeria and Greece. Her travels inform many of her books. Maud Howe Elliott was given an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from Brown University in 1940.

sources:

Elliott, Maud Howe. Three Generations. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1923.