An enduring mystery in Mark Twainβs life concerns the events of 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 Twainβs 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 (βI am not an American,β Twain wrote; βI am the Americanβ), undeterred by lifeβs 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 Twainβs life during those final years and who possibly held the answers to her questions about Twainβs life and writings.
Now, in Mark Twainβs Other Woman, after sixteen years of research, uncovering never-before-read papers and personal letters, Trombley tells the full story through Isabel Lyonβs meticulous daily journals, the only detailed record of Twainβs last years that exists, journals overlooked by Twainβs previous biographers.
For one hundred years, Isabel Van Kleek Lyon has been the mystery woman in Mark Twainβs 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 Twainβs adoring audience (she called him βthe Kingβ), listening attentively as he read aloud to her what heβd written that day. She was Twainβs gatekeeper to an enthralled public.
Trombley writes about what happened between them that resulted in the dramatic breakup of their relationship; abouthow, in Twainβs final months, he gave bitter, angry press conferences denouncing her; how he ranted in personal letters that she had injured him, calling her, βa 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.β Trombley writes that Twainβs 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 Twainβs biography.
For decades, biographers deliberately omitted her from the official Twain story. Her potentially destructive power was so great that Twainβs 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, βso private,β she wrote in her journal, βthat the very mention of me [was] with held from the world. . .β
This riveting, dark story that βthe Kingβ determined no one would ever tell is now revealed at last.
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