Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896)

by Bernard J. Dobski, Assumption University

A Shocking Claim for a Forgotten Book

On his seventy-third birthday and just a year and a half before his death, Mark Twain declared: “I like the Joan of Arc best of all my books; & it is the best; I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others: 12 years of preparation and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation, & got none.” [1]

This declaration about Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc should startle all those familiar with Twain’s work.  After all, the man considered by many to capture the true genius of American literature does not reserve this exceptional praise for his more recognizable classics like Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, or any of his books on Tom Sawyer, works that almost everyone has heard of even if they have not read them.

First edition of Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896)

But such judgment was not idly thrown out by Twain, the desperate remark of a literary genius wanting to end his career “on top.” While writing what would be the last novel he published in his lifetime, Twain claimed that no other work had “cost him so much thinking and weighing and measuring and planning or so much cautious and painstaking execution.” Even as he was conceiving the work, Twain sensed its importance. At Villa Viviani in Florence, he remarked that Personal Recollections “is to be a serious book. It means more to me than anything I have undertaken. I shall write it anonymously.” [2] (And, initially, he did exactly that, anonymously serializing his work on Joan with Harper’s Magazine in 1895 before publishing the collection as a book under his name in 1896.) And in a letter written to his trusted business advisor, H.H. Rogers, Twain said of this book: “Possibly the book may not sell, but that is nothing – it was written for love.” [3]  It is thus surprising that the work praised so highly by this giant of American literature should be virtually unknown outside of Twain enthusiasts.
There is good reason for this neglect. Personal Recollections strikes one as the most un-Twain like work of his corpus. This is partly due to the work’s form: Personal Recollections appears a mere work of history. It recounts in three Books the story of Joan of Arc’s life and military career as told by Sieur Louis De Conte, one of Joan’s childhood friends and her secretary during her military campaigns. The first eight chapters are dedicated to Joan’s childhood and the Archangel Michael’s revelation of her divine mission to save France. The second Book in the novel (41 Chapters) addresses Joan’s military career, detailing her meteoric rise from shepherdess of Domremy to General of the Armies of France, covering her victories at Orleans and Patay, the bloodless March to Rheims and the coronation of the King, and ending with her capture outside Compiegne. The third Book focuses on Joan’s imprisonment and her trial and execution by the Catholic Church under the approving eye of the English army.

Twain reinforces the impression of the novel’s historicity by claiming in the work’s front matter to have consulted, in an effort to verify the truthfulness of his portrait of Joan, no fewer than 11 authoritative sources on the life and death of the Maid. To all of this he adds the artistic conceit that these memoirs were discovered in the National Archives of France, originally composed in fifteenth century French, and recently translated into modern English.

In his last finished novel, Twain thus appears to eschew his trademark comedy in lieu of a tragic history. Indeed, his work goes to great lengths to suggest that it is as consistent with the historical record as the histories that his work consults. But it is not just the work’s form that makes it so odd; it is also its protagonist. In the place of impish American boys in search of adventures or playing pranks on others, Twain gives us a French girl who appears, modest, well-mannered, patriotic, and devoutly Catholic. Instead of the biting satire and anti-clerical and anti-French fury for which he was known, Twain here makes a Gallic saint his subject. More than that, he treats seriously Joan’s claim to divine authority and dedicates over a third of his longest novel to the intricacies of a Catholic Church trial.

Title page of Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc

Moreover, while it is true that Joan comes from humble stock and expresses no wish to join the elite of French society, her political commitments appear decidedly elitist. She defends the institution of French monarchy, supports the religious principle justifying its rule, and, as a reward for her efforts on behalf of Charles VII, requests for her hometown a tax-exempt status that no other French village enjoyed. All of these are strikingly out of tune with the strident defenses of equality and secular democracy expressed by Twain throughout much of his life and by so many of his fictional characters.

Finally, while Twain’s more popular works tend to end on a happier note, with his embattled protagonists getting saved, in many cases at the last minute and almost always involving a plot twist that borders on a deus ex machina, this last forgotten novel draws out Joan’s inevitable conviction and her fiery execution, an ending that was already well known. To be sure, there are moments, like some of the battle scenes depicted in Book II, where Twain displays his flair for narrative action and dramatic suspense. And the humor for which Twain was so justly celebrated does make a few scattered appearances, especially when he turns his attention to that lovable lout, the teller of outrageously tall tales, the braggadocious friend of Joan, Edmund Aubrey Jr., nicknamed the “Paladin.” But in a work of this length, these episodes feel too few and far between. In light of all of this, Personal Recollections appears a mass of incongruities. Why would Twain, the master of democratic literature, write such a book? And why would he call it his “best”?

 

Reception of Twain’s Joan

 

These and similar questions have nagged virtually all of those who read his Joan. Twain’s first biographer, Albert Paine, pointed out that those

 

Frontispeice of Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc

who began reading it for its lofty charm, with the first hint of Mark Twain as the author became fearful of some joke or burlesque. Some who now promptly hastened to read it as Mark Twain’s, were inclined to be disappointed at the very lack of these features. When the book itself appeared, the general public, still doubtful as to its merits, gave it a somewhat dubious reception. [4]

Some of the work’s early reviews praised Twain for his efforts at historical scholarship, but took aim at Twain’s style as being too modern and too American for its fifteenth century French narrator and too “vigorous for a man of eighty-two.”[5] Twain’s longtime friend and literary critic William Dean Howells, expressed similar reservations about Twain’s style here, but for opposite reasons. Howells writes that it

would be impossible for any one who was not a prig to keep the archaic attitude and parlance which the author attempts here and there; and I wish he had frankly refused to attempt it at all, I wish his personal recollections of Joan could have been written by some Southwestern American, translated into Domremy by some such mighty magic. [6]

Sharper yet is the judgment of twentieth century readers. Consider James Cox, who called Personal Recollections one of Twain’s “most lifeless performances”. [7] The “whole performance,” he writes, “is so dismal as to make one wish it were a parody, yet clearly it is no parody.” [8] Max Geismar doubles down on this negative review, calling it Clemens’ “worst book” and declaring that it “is difficult to find anything of interest in Joan of Arc – except its badness.” [9] For Geismar, Twain’s Joan reflects “‘every idea, every value, every emotion, every social institution he despised…” [10]

 

Mark Twain’s Joan of Arc, Harper & Brothers Publishers (1896)

To be sure, not everyone hated Personal Recollections. Twain’s first audience, his wife Olivia and daughters Susy, Jean, and Clara, gushed about “Papa’s” love for and work on the French saint. And while early sales disappointed, between 1904 and 1907 the novel sold over 15,000 copies, with each year recording an increase over its predecessor. Nor was the critical reception entirely negative. In an 1896 review, a writer for the Independent praised Twain’s ability to “depict in ‘singular and sustained’ fashion the figure of Joan of Arc.” [11] Even Howells, himself no fan of the book, thought it would be difficult to “convey a sense of the reverent tenderness with which the character of Joan is developed in this fiction.” Howells found Twain’s portrait of the historical Maid so moving that he thought it sufficient to steer a cynically secular century towards serious religious faith again. [12]

For similar reasons, Twain’s Catholic readers jumped at the opportunity to claim for their faith Twain’s newfound religious respect. In his review of Personal Recollections, Father Daniel Hudson argued that Twain “portrayed [St. Joan’s] beauty of character with a power and sympathy of which no other writer in the English tongue…has so far been capable.” [13]  Another Catholic reviewer was so bewitched by this hagiography of Joan that he felt Twain, whose anti-Catholic sentiments were widely documented, was “doing violence to his theology, contradicting most of his written convictions, completely indulging his one leaning towards faith.” [14]  Such has been the Catholic reception of Twain’s Joan that the Catholic Ignatius Press published its own version of Personal Recollections in 1989.

Such widely diverging responses merely confirm the initial bewilderment over Twain’s judgment about his book on Joan. Those interested in unraveling such a puzzle might begin by looking at the places where Twain speaks and writes about Joan of Arc. But to do this, one must be prepared to go beyond the effusive praise offered by his wife and daughters, praise attesting both to Twain’s love for the Maid of Orleans and to their enthusiasm for the book devoted to her.

The ”Riddle of the Ages” in Twain’s Life

In his biography of Twain, Paine attributes the origins of his interest in history to a chance encounter with “Joan.” According to Paine, Twain, while yet a printer’s apprentice no more than fourteen years old,

was on his way from the office to his home one afternoon when he saw flying along the pavement a square of paper, a leaf from a book. … He caught the flying scrap and examined it. It was a leaf from some history of Joan of Arc. The “maid” was described in the cage at Rouen, in the fortress, and the two ruffian English soldiers had stolen her clothes. … there arose within him a deep compassion for the gentle Maid of Orleans, a burning resentment toward her captors, a powerful and indestructible interest in her sad history. It was an interest that would grow steadily for more than half a lifetime and culminate at last in that crowning work, the Recollections, the loveliest story ever told of the martyred girl. [15]

Twain attributes his willingness to pick up the page and read this “leaf” to his budding professional experience: at this time “any printed matter had acquired a professional interest for him.” Linda Morris notes that around 1866, almost twenty years after his windblown encounter with Joan, Twain “pasted in one of his scrapbooks” a clipping of a “relatively long article from an unknown newspaper, detailing the life of Joan.” [16] By the time he delivered his speech “To the Ladies” at the 1872 anniversary festival of the Scottish incorporation in London, [17] almost a quarter of a century before publishing Personal Recollections, Joan loomed large in Twain’s mind as the paragon of noble self-sacrifice. There Twain asks his audience “Who was more patriotic than Joan of Arc? Who was braver? Who has given us a grander instance of self-sacrificing devotion?”

“Mark Twain Receiving a Laurel Wreath from Joan of Arc at the Dinner of the Society of American Illustrators.”  Photo appeared in the pictorial section of New York Times (December 31, 1905).  Andrew Carnegie (far right), Mark Twain (second from right) and Dan Beard (third from right).

In his essay “Saint Joan of Arc”, published for Harper’s in 1904, Twain goes even further. He declares Joan “the Wonder of the Ages” whose memory remains “stainlessly pure, in mind and heart, in speech and deed and spirit, and will so endure until the end of time.” [18] But Joan’s miraculous deeds also make her the “Riddle of the Ages,” for when “we set about accounting for a Napoleon or a Shakespeare or a Raphael or a Wagner or an Edison or other extraordinary person,” Twain writes, “we understand that the measure of his talent will not explain the whole result, nor even the largest part of it; no, it is the atmosphere in which the talent was cradled that explains.” [19]  Joan stands out from all humanity for Twain not only because of her incredible nobility and her extraordinary gifts, but because she seemed to exercise all of her gifts at their peak and from the very beginning, absent any of those external aids available to history’s outstanding commanders, artists, and inventors.

Because her genius is utterly independent of external influences, Joan of Arc is in a league of her own. As such, if one managed to unwrap the riddle of Joan’s excellences, “[t]aking into account…all the circumstances — her origin, youth, sex, illiteracy, early environment, and the obstructing conditions under which she exploited her high gifts and made her conquests in the field and before the courts that tried her for her life,” then one will have understood “by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced.” [20] In his marginalia of John O’Hagan’s 1893 book Joan of Arc, Twain doubles down on this: “If the 10 greatest of the earth be chosen, she must be of the 10; if 2, she must be of the 2; if there is but one supremely great then she is that one.” [21] Twain’s comments thus seem to present Joan’s life as a serious candidate for the standard by which all humans are to take their guidance, a model of human excellence whose political implications – given her defense of divine right kingship – should be more than a little discomfiting for fans of democratic politics.

As if this wasn’t praise enough, Twain also uses Joan to frame his career. For instance, he not only gives the impression to Paine, his official biographer, that his encounter with Joan inspired the start of his career. He also concludes “The Turning Point of My Life,” an essay published the year he died, with the strange wish that Adam and Eve might have been replaced by Martin Luther and Joan of Arc on the grounds that their “asbestos” temperaments would have prevented man’s original sin, preempting the “Fall” that set in motion those innumerable events which began with human life on earth and, over the course of millennia, led to Samuel L. Clemens becoming the author Mark Twain. Had Joan replaced Eve, Twain remarks, there would “be no human race; there would be no you; there would be no me. And the old, old creation-dawn scheme of ultimately launching me into the literary guild would have been defeated.” [22]

From this perspective, then, Joan’s spiritual and physical purity, her self-command and humility, offer an antidote to the determinist principles that otherwise dictate human affairs and deprive man of his moral and creative freedom. And on the last page of his Autobiography, published a century after his death, Twain inserts a letter from Hellen Keller which he describes as a “fine and great and noble sample of” literature and that

no fellow to it had ever issued from any girl’s lips since Joan of Arc, that immortal child of seventeen, stood alone and friendless in her chains, five centuries ago, and confronted her judges – the concentrated learning and intellect of France – and fenced with them week by week and day by day, answering them out of her great heart and her untaught but marvelous mind, and always defeating them, always camping on the field and master of it as each day’s sun went down. [23]

Joan thus represents for Twain, on the one hand, the peak of human excellence, a model of human flourishing. On the other hand, she is the “star and compass” of Twain’s literary career. Joan serves as the inspiration for his vocation and the means by which that career could have been prevented. She is both the accident that necessitated Twain’s professional calling and the freedom that defies the determinism, material and psychological, apparently endorsed in so much of his writing. And she offers the long dead Twain the last image through which our deceased author can posthumously bring his legendary career, which he has momentarily resurrected, to its final close.

Such evidence, taken all together, suggests that Twain would have his readers believe Joan of Arc was the alpha and omega of his literary life. But that literary life was also defined by a critical tension: Twain’s fiction supports belief in individual moral agency, a progressive view of history, and the existence of a providential God who rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked. But it also reveals searing critiques of the Bible and Christian civilization, offers numerous statements supporting 18th century deistic rationalism, and endorses environmental and material determinism. Could Twain’s portrayal of the Maid of Orleans be so important to his intellectual interests that thinking about his book on Joan helps one navigate this career-defining tension?

If it is so important, then the model for the towering protagonist who dominates this novel cannot only be his daughter Susy, who is said to have inspired the physical description of Joan. One must consider that Twain drew inspiration from other talented and powerful individuals, like those he knew personally (Hellen Keller, Frederick Douglass, Ulysses S. Grant) as well as those he didn’t (Caesar, Napoleon, Shakespeare).

Personal Recollections in Twain’s Work and Thought:

Thus far, the preceding steps have not solved the riddle of Twain’s Joan of Arc. If anything, they have intensified it. For the intrepid readers interested in solving such a mystery, Twain offers them two paths they must be willing to explore.

The first concerns the broader literary context in which Twain situates this book. Personal Recollections was published amidst a pentalogy of novels oriented around the origins and conditions of modernity: The Prince & the Pauper, Connecticut Yankee, Pudd’nhead Wilson, Personal Recollections, and the unfinished No. 44, Mysterious Stranger. All five prompt their readers to reflect on how modernity emerged from the medieval world, a question whose importance to Twain can be seen in his virtual obsession with the histories of William Lecky, Thomas Carlyle, and Thomas Babington Macaulay. And most of these novels flirt with the form of medieval romance. Finally, all five novels take up the question of what constitutes the basis of rightful political authority over human beings. Through their imagery, their plots, and their character arcs, these novels invite their readers to reflect on whether rightful political authority comes from God, human wisdom and moral virtue, popular consent, or force and fraud. By presenting Joan as God’s divinely anointed savior of France, Personal Recollections allows us to focus more directly on the question of divine authority.

And that brings one to the second and most important path, namely Personal Recollections itself. How can this powerfully moving account of a pious, unschooled, peasant girl rising from the pastures of Domremy to lead the Armies of France, defeat the hated English, and end the Hundred Years’ War help one understand more fully the debate that enlivens and complicates so much of his literary fiction?

One might begin by reading the novel with an eye for why men, like the work’s narrator and Joan’s many followers — soldier and general alike — saw this simple peasant girl as so perfect that she was considered practically divine herself. If it was her glittering reputation for justice, nobility, and patriotism, then how does Twain show us such virtues in action? If, on the other hand, her greatness flowed from the political and military exploits that she performed, then how was this apparently illiterate shepherdess able to acquire the skills in horsemanship, sword play, artillery, and battlefield strategy and tactics that produced victories at Orleans, Jargeau, and Patay? Does Twain’s narrative lead us to think that such virtues come from God? Or might they be accounted for more prosaically by Joan’s extensive experience with her fellow peasants and the animals they loved and cared for?

Curious readers will also need to wonder about the source of her statesmanship, especially the “Seeing Eye” and “Creating Mouth” attributed to her by her knights, traits that enabled her to turn cowards into fierce warriors and to select men, like Arthur de Richemont, critical to winning The Hundred Years’ War. Perhaps most importantly, they will need to ask how she could, seemingly miraculously, identify the Dauphin — the heir to the French throne disguised as a commoner amidst his royal court — and allay the secret doubts about his legitimacy that were sapping his political will. At the same time, Twain’s portrait of his impressive heroine leaves the reader wondering how she could also fall prey to a predictable and heavy-handed religious prosecution bent on her destruction.

Reflecting on Joan and her devoted followers naturally brings the reader into conversation with her chief rival, the Catholic Church. For one cannot understand Joan’s appeal and power without also understanding why she poses such a threat to the English-backed Catholic Church. Twain reserves Book III for the imprisonment, trial, and execution of Joan and it is there where one encounters the Church most directly. Readers unbowed by the foregoing will need to wonder why the Church is so interested in politics. And they will need to focus on the issue of Joan’s transvestitism, the issue for which the historical Church executes Joan but which Twain trebles in his account.

Grappling with these many issues proves difficult. This task becomes even more difficult when we factor in Twain’s artistry. The ever-crafty Twain openly concedes that he conveys the lessons of his fiction “in between the lines”, a manner of writing that is, as he states in many places, critical to artistic forms like burlesque, humor, comedy, parody, and autobiography, all of which he employed and all of which can be found in Personal Recollections.

While there are many reasons for Twain’s studied ambiguity, the most important might be that what he has to show us cannot be shown openly, that for Twain’s readers to appreciate his wisdom on matters as fundamental as the existence of providential deities they must work carefully – and on their own – through the language and imagery he employs, follow closely the plots he devises and structures, and take seriously the characters he brings to life for us.

This last one may be the toughest pill to swallow. And it is toughest because it requires readers to consider the possibility that what his characters represent or the causes they champion might… somehow …be true. That means that in the case of Joan, her narrator, and her many loyal followers, Twain’s readers need to take seriously both the noble allure of patriotic self-sacrifice and the claims of revealed religion as embodied in the Catholic faith. And this is difficult not least because it forces one to entertain the possibility that his more public denunciations of Catholicism, of patriotism – of the French! – don’t actually reflect his most reasoned or deeply held views on these subjects.

“Joan of Arc entering Orléans” from Edward Sylvester Ellis and Charles F. Horne, The Story of the Greatest Nations (1900)

“The Martyrdom of the Maid of Orléans” from Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896)

But if we allow ourselves to reconsider these long-standing views of Twain, then we will find ourselves in a position to rethink many of the other widespread, but perhaps incomplete or misleading, bromides associated with Samuel Langhorne Clemens: that he is merely a humorist, a social critic, a teller of tall-tales for naughty boys, the defender of the poor and downtrodden, the avatar of progress, critic of capitalism and imperialism, an enemy of racism and a force for greater equality, and on and on and on. While all of these may, each in their own way, capture some truth about Twain, they don’t get at what he must have thought about the questions that stand at the core of his literary fiction. Rethinking these views will prepare us to appreciate the depths of Twain’s wisdom; more importantly, it will allow us to see what is at stake when we take Twain at his own word and read Personal Recollections as his “best” novel.

Notes

[1] Stated on November 30th, 1908, as recorded by Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography 3 vols. (New York: Harper and Bros, 1912), hereafter abbreviated to MTB, 2:1034.

[2] Paine, MTB, 2:959.

[3] Letter to Rogers, January 29, 1895, in Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Correspondence with Henry Huttleson Rogers, 1893-1909, ed. Lewis Leary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), hereafter abbreviated to MTHHR, 143.

[4] Paine, MTB, 2:1028.

[5] Thomas Maik, Re-Examination of Mark Twain’s Joan of Arc (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), hereafter abbreviated to Re-Examination, 144.

[6] See My Mark Twain: Reminiscences and Criticisms, ed. Marilyn Austin Baldwin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1967) 131.

[7] James M. Cox, Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), hereafter abbreviated to Fate, 21.

[8] Cox, Fate, 263.

[9] Maxwell Geismar, Mark Twain, American Prophet (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), hereafter abbreviated to Prophet, 148; see also 155-6.

[10] Geismar, Prophet, 152.

[11] Paine, MTB, 2:1006, as cited in Maik, Re-Examination, 146.

[12] Maik, Re-Examination, 134.

[13] Father Daniel Hudson, “Review of Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc,” Ave Maria 75 (1912), 729, as quoted in Joseph B. Fulton, The Reverend Mark Twain: Theological Burlesque, Form, and Content (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006), hereafter abbreviated to Reverend, 107.

[14] As quoted in Fulton, Reverend, 107.

[15] See Paine, MTB, 1:81-82.

[16] See Linda Morris, “What is ‘Personal’ about Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc?”, American Literary Realism 51:2 (2019), hereafter abbreviated to “Personal”, 97-110, 98-99.

[17] Originally transcribed by The London Observer in 1872, “The Ladies” can be found in Mark Twain Speaking, edited by Paul Fatout (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1976), 78-81.

[18] Mark Twain, Saint Joan of Arc (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1897), hereafter abbreviated to Saint, 16

[19] Twain, Saint, 17.

[20] Twain, Saint, 25.

[21] As quoted in Morris, “Personal,” 110, fn. 38.

[22] Mark Twain, “The Turning Point in My Life,” in What Is Man? And Other Philosophical Writings, ed. Paul Baender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 464, italics in original.

[23] Dictated in 1906 but published in Autobiography of Mark Twain: Vol. I, ed. Harriet Elinor Smith, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 466

Suggested Readings

Dobski, Bernard. Mark Twain’s Joan of Arc: Political Wisdom, Divine Justice, and the Origins of  Modernity. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).

_____. “A Quixotic Joan? Twain and Cervantes on Modern Politics.” The Mark Twain Annual. (December 19, 2024) 22: 45-66.

Foster, David. “On the Theme of Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc.” The Mark Twain Annual 13 (2015): 43-62.

Fulton, Joseph B. The Reverend Mark Twain: Theological Burlesque, Form, and Content (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006).

Harris, Susan K. “Afterword.” Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc: The Oxford Mark Twain, ed. Shelley Fishkin (Oxford University Press: New York, 1996), 1-11.

_____. “Narrative Structure in Mark Twain’s Joan of Arc.” Journal of Narrative Theory, 12 (1982): 48-56.

Hobbins, Daniel. The Trial of Joan of Arc: Translated and introduced by Daniel Hobbins, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2005).

Jenn, Ronald and Linda Morris. “The Sources of Mark Twain’s ‘Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc’.” Mark Twain Journal 55:1/2 (2017): 55-74.

Louis-Dimitrov, Delphine. “The Democratic Reconfiguration of History in Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc.” American Literary Realism 51, No. 2 (Winter 2019): 162-179.

_____. “Nature in Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc: Pastoralism Revisited.” The Mark Twain Annual 17 (2019): 88-117.

Maik, Thomas A. A Re-Examination of Mark Twain’s Joan of Arc (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992).

McWilliams, Wilson Carey. “Divine Right: Mark Twain’s Joan of Arc.” The Review of Politics 69 (2007): 329-352.

_____. “Poetry, Politics, and the Comic Spirit.” PS: Political Science and Politics 28, No. 2 (June 1995): 197-200.

Zwarg, Christina. “Woman as Force in Twain’s Joan of Arc: The Unwordable Fascination.” Criticism 27:1 (1985): 57-72.

Equestrian Statue of Joan of Arc. Emmanuel Fremiet (1874) – 13 feet tall. Located at Place des Pyramides, Paris, France.

About the Author

Bernard J. (BJ) Dobski is Professor of Political Science at Assumption University in Worcester, MA. He is the author of Mark Twain’s Joan of Arc: Political Wisdom, Divine Justice & the Origins of Modernity (2024). He has published articles on Mark Twain’s political wisdom in the Review of Politics, the Journal of American Political Thought, and The Mark Twain Annual. He has also published widely on classical Greek political thought and on the plays and poetry of William Shakespeare. Professor Dobski is a member of the 2023 Class of Quarry Farm Fellows.

Professor Dobski has particpated in both the Trouble Begins and Park Church lecture series.  His talks include:

 

  • Bernard J. Dobski, “Mark Twain’s Critique of Divine Providence: Joan of Arc and Personal Recollections (May 28, 2025 – Quarry Farm Barn)
  • Bernard J. Dobski, “Twain’s Machiavellian Princess: Personal Recollections and Political Philosophy” (August 2, 2023 – The Park Church)
    Bernard Dobski 2023 Quarry Farm Fellow