Timothy Noah and Marjorie Williams

Dear Tim,

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I don't understand the sudden onset of Mark Twain chic (when did he get un-chic?), but I couldn't resist posting one last time to promote my favorite non-fiction work of his: an essay he wrote "In Defense of Harriet Shelley," which foreshadowed truly modern thinking about Trophy Wives and Displaced Homemakers. Twain's acid piece protests the then-standard biography of the poet Percy Bysse Shelley, which somehow managed to blame First Wife Harriet for the fact that Shelley had run off with Second Wife (and eventual "Frankenstein" creator) Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, after which poor Harriet--pregnant at the time of her abandonment--drowned herself in despair. It's a hoot. "Yes, Shelley had found this child of sixteen to his liking," Twain wrote of the poet's his courtship with Mary, "and had wooed and won her" during long walks in a graveyard. "But that is nothing; it was better than wooing her in her nursery, at any rate, where it might have disturbed the other children."

Ever sivilized,

Marjorie

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