Editing Julia Ward Howe (section)

===Writing===
[[File:John Elliott - Julia Ward Howe - Google Art Project.jpg|thumb|Portrait of Julia Ward Howe, by [[John Elliott (artist)|John Elliott]], 1925]]
She attended lectures, studied foreign languages, and wrote plays and dramas. Prior to her marriage, Howe had published essays on [[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe|Goethe]], [[Friedrich Schiller|Schiller]] and [[Alphonse de Lamartine|Lamartine]] in the ''[[New York Review and Theological Review]]''.<ref name=VanB /> Her first volume of poetry, ''Passion-Flowers'' was published anonymously in 1853. The book collected personal poems and was written without the knowledge of her husband, who was then editing the [[Free Soil]] newspaper ''The Commonwealth''.<ref>Williams, Gary. ''Hungry Heart: The Literary Emergence of Julia Ward Howe''. Amherst: [[University of Massachusetts Press]], 1999: 134–135. {{ISBN|1-55849-157-0}}</ref> Her second anonymous collection, ''Words for the Hour'', appeared in 1857.<ref name=VanB /> She went on to write plays such as ''Leonora'', ''The World's Own'', and ''Hippolytus''.  These works all contained allusions to her stultifying marriage.<ref name=VanB />

Unpublished during her lifetime but certainly part of her twenty-first century legacy is a fragmentary novel, ''The Hermaphrodite,'' assembled from manuscript fragments in Harvard's Houghton Library by Gary Williams and published in 2004 by the University of Nebraska Press.

She went on trips including several for missions. In 1860, she published ''A Trip to Cuba'', which told of her 1859 trip. It had generated outrage from [[William Lloyd Garrison]], an abolitionist, for its derogatory view of Black people. Howe believed it was right to free the slaves but did not believe in racial equality.<ref>"JULIA WARD HOWE (1819–1910)." Slavery in the United States: A Social, Political, and Historical Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2007. Credo Reference. Web. November 14, 2013.</ref> Several letters on High Newport society were published in the ''[[New York Tribune]]'' in 1860, as well.<ref name=VanB />

Howe's being a published author troubled her husband greatly, especially due to the fact that her poems many times had to do with critiques of women's roles as wives, her own marriage, and women's place in society.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.womenofthehall.org/inductee/julia-ward-howe/|title=Julia Ward Howe – National Women's Hall of Fame|work=National Women's Hall of Fame|access-date=January 21, 2014}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/ww/howe.html|title=Open Collections Program: Women Working, Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910)|work=Women Working, 1800 – 1930|publisher=Harvard University Library|access-date=January 21, 2014}}</ref> Their marriage problems escalated to the point where they separated in 1852. Samuel, when he became her husband, had also taken complete control of her estate income. Upon her husband's death in 1876, she found that through a series of bad investments, most of her money had been lost.<ref name="Julia Ward Howe Biography" />

Howe's writing and social activism were greatly shaped by her upbringing and married life. Much study has gone into her difficult marriage and how it influenced her work, both written and active.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Lepore |first1=Jill |title='The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe,' by Elaine Showalter |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/06/books/review/the-civil-wars-of-julia-ward-howe-by-elaine-showalter.html |work=The New York Times |access-date=August 27, 2020 |date=February 29, 2016}}</ref>