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About Paula Harrington
Paula Harrington is Director Emerita of the Farnham Writers’ Center at Colby College, where she was also an Associate Professor of Writing and taught American Literature. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Paris, France, where she researched Mark Twain’s antipathy for the French. That work led to the book, Mark Twain & France: The Making of a New American Identity ( U. Missouri P, 2017), co-written with Ronald Jenn, Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Lille, France. Their work was shortlisted for the French Heritage Society Book Award and nominated for the Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism. In addition, Harrington wrote the blog Marking Twain in Paris, and she has published several articles on Twain’s work in the Mark Twain Annual and the French Review of American Studies. She was the Senior Researcher for the France-Berkeley Fund Grant project, The “French Marginalia” of Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc: Patriotism Without Borders (with Ronald Jenn, and Linda Morris). She has given talks on Twain in France at the universities of Sorbonne Paris Nord, Lille, Lyons, and Angers and the American Library in Paris, as well as at public libraries and bookstores in Maine, where she lives.
Jane Lampton “Jean” Clemens
Image Courtesy of the Mark Twain Archive, Elmira College, Elmira, NY.
Image courtesy of the Mark Twain House and Museum, Hartford, CT.
Image Courtesy of the Mark Twain Archive, Elmira College, Elmira, NY
Jane Lampton “Jean” Clemens was the fourth and final child of Samuel and Olivia (“Livy”) Langdon Clemens. Named after Sam’s mother, she was always called “Jean” by family and friends. Jean was born on July 26, 1880, at Quarry Farm, the Clemens’s summer home in Elmira, New York owned by Livy’s sister and brother-in-law Susan (“Aunt Sue”) and Theodore Crane. Though the youngest of the four Clemens children, she grew up as the third of their three daughters; their first-born, a son named Langdon, had died of diphtheria in June of 1872 when he was only 19 months old. Jean’s two sisters were Olivia, known as “Susy,” and Clara, nicknamed “Bay.” Born in 1872 and 1874 respectively, they were both several years older than Jean.
After her first few years, Jean led a somewhat separate life from her sisters, who were closer to each other not only in age but also in temperament, interests, and life experiences. As she grew older, her differences from her sisters became apparent. While they pursued writing, music, and singing – Susy was already writing her biography of her father, Papa, at the age of 13 and Clara was immersing herself in music, eventually becoming a professional singer – Jean was most drawn to nature and especially to animals. “I know a few people who love the country as I do, but not many,” she once reflected. “Most of my acquaintances are enthusiastic over the spring and summer months, but very few care much for it the year round…To me, it is all as fascinating as a book – more so, since I have never lost interest in it” (Paine, 1552-1553). Not surprisingly, then, Jean preferred from a young age to spend her time outdoors and with other creatures. Commenting on his daughters’ prospects when Susy was about 19, Clara about 17, and Jean about 11, their father joked, “We haven’t forecast Jean’s future yet, but think she is going to be a horse jockey and live in the stable” (Courtney, 85). Eventually, Jean joined the Humane Society and became what we today call an animal rights activist. In her father’s later years, she was able, through her own passion for that cause, to interest him in it and specifically in anti-vivisectionism, which led Twain to write such stories as “A Dog’s Tale” and “A Horse Tale.”
When she was 15, Jean was diagnosed with epilepsy. For the rest of her life, she suffered badly from the condition, which had no effective treatment at the time. Although she had some periods of remission, her chronic illness and unpredictable seizure episodes limited her life and social activities. She never married, had children, or developed a paid profession. She died at the age of 29 on Christmas Eve while living with her father at Stormfield, the mansion he had built in Redding, Connecticut. She was taking a bath after helping to decorate for the holidays and apparently had a seizure that led to either heart failure or asphyxiation. Her heartbroken father, who had already lost his oldest daughter Susy to spinal meningitis at the age of 24 and his beloved wife Livy to chronic illness at the age of 56, died himself four months later. (Clara then became the only surviving member of the immediate family.)
Childhood Years and European Travels
The entire family was delighted by Jean’s birth. Her father called her “the prettiest & perfectest little creature we have turned out yet” and wrote that “Susy & Bay could not worship it more if it were a cat” (Salsbury 119–20). Livy described Jean as “a wonderfully nice baby . . . a dear little thing” and “the fattest healthiest baby we have had” (letter to Mollie Clemens in Snedecor, 155-156). She wrote a friend that Jean “is a comfort to us all. She looks very much like her father and is very fond of him”( letter to Hattie J. Gerhardt in Snedecor, 158).
Like her sisters, Jean spent her early years dividing time with her family between their main residence in the Nook Farm neighborhood of Hartford, Connecticut, and Quarry Farm. Typically, they spent extended summers – often April to September – at the Farm, where Jean was free to roam outdoors and be near animals. Her father related how, at the age of 3, she delighted in watching the milking of cows.
She sits rapt and contented while David milks the three, making a remark now and then—always about the cows. The time passes slow and drearily for her attendant, but not for her—she could stand a week of it. When the milking is finished and “Blanche,” “Jean” and “the cross cow” turned into the adjoining little cow-lot, we have to set Jean on a shed in that lot, and stay by her half an hour till Elisa the German nurse comes to take her to bed. The cows merely stand there, amongst the ordure, which is dry or sloppy according to the weather, and do nothing—yet the mere sight of them is all-sufficient for Jean; she requires nothing more” (Twain, A Family Sketch 95b).
Clemens family at their Hartford House in 1884. From left to right: Susy Clemens, Sam Clemens, Jean Clemens, Olivia Clemens, and Clara Clemens.
Image courtesy of the Mark Twain House and Museum, Hartford, CT.
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