Dangerous Intimacy: The Untold Story of Mark Twain's Final Years
By Karen Lystra Among the vast archive of documents in the Mark Twain Papers at UC-Berkeley is Twain's memoir fragment about his former personal secretary and his exâ€"business managerâ€"whom he accused of turning him into "another stripped & forlorn King Lear." While Twain left this scathing piece unpublished, and his surviving daughter drew a posthumous veil over the near-scandal that had erupted when Twain fired the two amid accusations of financial impropriety, Lystra (professor of American Studies, California State University at Fullerton) recounts the family drama that took place during Twain's last decade. Isabel Lyon joined the Clemens household in 1902 as the writer's secretary, a few years before her future husband, Ralph Ashcroft, started managing Twain's business affairs. Using Lyon's diaries and notebooks, which have been mostly neglected by previous scholars, Lystra shows how ardently Lyon tried to make herself indispensable and implies that she was instrumental in alienating Twain's affections from his daughter Jean, who was institutionalized for three years for her poorly understood epilepsy; the book's saddest chapters explore the state of psychiatry and the prejudices of the time. Twain's eventual reliance on Lyon and Ashcroft brought them into conflict with his daughter Clara, who finally accused them of embezzlement. Although an independent audit turned up no evidence, Twain turned on them for supposedly tricking him into giving them power of attorney over the Mark Twain Company.
Published Date: 09/08/2006
Format: PaperBack
ISBN: 0-520-25000-1
Publisher: University Of California Press
Rating:
price 18 $
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