Just published; should be in libraries next week:

Joann P. Krieg, "Don't let us talk of that anymore": Whitman's
Estrangement from the Costelloe-Smith Family," Walt Whitman Quarterly
Review 17 (Winter 2000) 91-120.  [In the mid-1880s, Walt Whitman was a
regular guest at the Philadelphia home of Hannah Whitall Smith, the WCTU
activist and author of "The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life."  Krieg
traces Whitman's friendship and abrupt estrangement from the family of
HWS.  She argues that this the estrangement had nothing to do with the
content of Whitman's verse, or the possible influence of Whitman on the
emerging sexual orientation of HWS's homosexual son, Logan Pearsall Smith.
Rather, the Whitall Smiths dropped Whitman (and many others) from their
social life in the wake of embarrassing domestic problems.  More
specifically, HWS was reluctant to communicate to her Philadelphia/Camden
circle the news that her daughter Mary abandoned her children and her
husband, Frank Costelloe, to live with art critic Bernhard Berenson in
Italy.  Mary was one of Whitman's favorite young friends.  The article
illuminates the intellectual history of one of the temperance movement's
most important families, and it suggests a cause for the confused
bitterness Whitman expressed towards the temperance cause in the later
1880s and early 1890s.]

Jon

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Jon Stephen Miller
Managing Editor
Walt Whitman Quarterly Review
Department of English
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa  52242-1492
[log in to unmask]  (319) 335-0592
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