An enduring mystery in Mark Twain’s life concerns the events of
來源：香港大書城megBookStore,http://www.megbook.com.hk his last decade, from 1900 to 1910.
Despite many Twain biographies, no one has ever
determined exactly what took place during those final years after
the death of Twain’s wife of thirty-four years and how those
experiences affected him, personally and professionally. For nearly
a century, it was believed that Twain went to his death a beloved,
wisecracking iconoclastic American “I am not an American,” Twain
wrote; “I am the American”, undeterred by life’s sorrows and
challenges.
Laura Skandera Trombley, the preeminent Twain
scholar at work today, suspected that there had to be more to the
story than the cultivated, carefully constructed version that had
been intact for so long. Trombley went in search of the one woman
whom she suspected had played the largest role in Twain’s life
during those final years and who possibly held the answers to her
questions about Twain’s life and writings.
Now, in Mark Twain’s Other Woman, after sixteen
years of research, uncovering never-before-read papers and personal
letters, Trombley tells the full story through Isabel Lyon’s
meticulous daily journals, the only detailed record of Twain’s last
years that exists, journals overlooked by Twain’s previous
biographers.
For one hundred years, Isabel Van Kleek Lyon has
been the mystery woman in Mark Twain’s life. Twain spent the bulk
of his last six years in the company of Isabel, who was responsible
for overseeing his schedule and finances, nursing him through
several illnesses, managing his increasingly unmanageable
daughters, running his household, arranging amusements, as well as
presiding over the construction of his final residence. Isabel Lyon
also served as Twain’s adoring audience she called him “the
King”, listening attentively as he read aloud to her what he’d
written that day. She was Twain’s gatekeeper to an enthralled
public.
Trombley writes about what happened between them
that resulted in the dramatic breakup of their relationship; about
how, in Twain’s final months, he gave bitter, angry press
conferences denouncing her; how he ranted in personal letters that
she had injured him, calling her, “a liar, a forger, a thief, a
hypocrite, a drunkard, a sneak, a humbug, a traitor, a conspirator,
a filthy-minded salacious slut pining for seduction.”
Trombley writes that Twain’s invective bordered on obsession he
wrote about Isabel for hours every day, even while suffering from
angina pains and gout attacks and about how, despite the
inordinate attention he gave her before his death, Isabel Lyon has
remained a friendless ghost haunting the margins of Twain’s
biography.
For decades, biographers deliberately omitted
her from the official Twain story. Her potentially destructive
power was so great that Twain’s handpicked hagiographer, Albert
Bigelow Paine, allowed only one timorous reference to her in his
massive three-volume work, Mark Twain: A Biography 1912.
Isabel Lyon was a forgotten woman, “so private,”
she wrote in her journal, “that the very mention of me [was] with
held from the world. . .”
This riveting, dark story that “the King”
determined no one would ever tell is now revealed at last.
From the Hardcover edition.
關於作者：
Laura Skandera Trombley was raised in Southern California and
attended Pepperdine University, where she earned her BA and MA, and
the University of Southern California, where she earned a PhD in
English literature. She is the president of Pitzer College in
Claremont, California, and is the author of Mark Twain in the
Company of Women.
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