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 Maud Howe Elliott (1854-1948)
'Noted daughter of a famous mother'

  By BARBARA POLICHETTI
Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer

Her birthright was public notability, and throughout her long and accomplished life, Maud Howe Elliott strove to live up to the standards of her well-known and revered parents.

Her mother was Julia Ward Howe, abolitionist, pioneer in the women's suffrage movement and gracious hostess who drew the likes of Oscar Wilde and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to her dinner table. She is best known as the woman who, on a sleepless night, penned the poem that would become the lyrics to "Battle Hymn of the Republic."

Maud Howe Elliott's father, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, founded Perkins Institute for the Blind and was remembered by Helen Keller as the man who invented the system of teaching blind deaf-mutes.

And although Maud Howe Elliott spent most of her summers in the center of Newport society, where hostesses vied to hold their midnight balls on the night of a full moon, she worked ceaselessly to build meaning into what could have been just a life of leisure.

She became a Pulitzer prize-winning author, charter member of the Art Association of Newport, activist in Theodore Roosevelt's presidential campaign, a founder of the Progessive political party and a participant in the suffrage movement.

Still, the shadow of her parents proved almost impossible to escape. When she died at age 94 at her beloved Newport summer home, called "Lilliput," the obituary, although it listed her many accomplishments, still referred to her as "noted daughter of a famous mother."

The phrase should not diminish the fact that Maud Howe Elliott had the energy and elegance to bridge the world of social activism and that of lace and late-afternoon teas in Newport.

She was born Nov. 9, 1854, at the Perkins Institute. She was educated in Boston and abroad, with a curriculum that went beyond academics to include dancing, painting and music. In 1887, at 33, she married John Elliott, an artist who would become nationally known for his portraits.

She wrote several novels, but is best known for the biography of her mother - Julia Ward Howe - on which she collaborated with her sisters. The book was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1915.

Most of her writing was nonfiction. She was a correspondent for several newspapers and her books are chronicles with detailed personal memories that range from finding the poet Bret Harte at the family dinner table to swimming in Narragansett Bay and then foraging for fresh mussels and Aquidneck Island blackberries.

In her last book, This Was My Newport, she recalled a "simpler day" when people dined late on "high teas" of "Newport specialties" such as soft-shell crabs, corn on the cob and jonnycakes.

"If these old Newport houses could speak," she wrote of the grand summer "cottages" of the wealthy, "what tales they could tell . . . stories of ladies and their lovers who wrote their names with diamonds on the window panes."

Just as she used pieces of her wedding dress and the ballgown her mother wore when the Civil War ended to create her own treasured patchwork quilt, Maud Howe Elliott used the pieces of her rich life to stitch together the picture of an American era.

Her writing and voluminous chronicles and diaries made her a valuable historian who was given an honorary degree of doctor of letters by Brown University in 1940.

She died on March 19, 1948.

Sources: Files of the Providence Journal; This Was My Newport, by Maud Howe Elliott; Notable American Women, published by Harvard University.

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