Howard

Mosely and Eliza Anne (Hudson) Howard, was
born at Bangor, Me. The Howards were de-
scended from John Howard who came to Dux-
bury, Mass., from England in 1643, an<^ ^ater ^e"
came one of the original proprietors of Bridge-
water, Mass. Blanche attended the public schools
of Bangor and graduated from the high school.
She began to write when only a girl; her first
novel, One Summer, appeared in 1875. This
same year she went abroad for study and travel,
with an assignment as correspondent for the
Boston Transcript, and in 1877 published a rec-
ord of some of her travels under the title, One
Year Abroad. Settling in Stuttgart, Germany,
she taught, chaperoned American girls studying
art and music, wrote novels, and edited a maga-
zine in English. In 1890 she married Dr. Julius
von Teuffel, court physician to the King of
Wurttemberg. He was a man of wealth, social
standing, and culture, and they occupied an en-
viable position in Stuttgart society. Von Teuffel
was proud of his wife's accomplishments and en-
couraged her in her literary work. Their brief,
happy married life was ended by his death in
1896, but his widow remained in Germany, where
all her interests now were. She made a home
for a number of nephews and nieces, continued
her writing, under her maiden name, and super-
vised translations of her books. She was also a
pianist of considerable ability and a student of
philosophy, science, sociology, and education.
Much of her time was given to public and private
charities. Of vigorous physique, she loved out-
door life and was a bicyclist and a swimmer.

The list of her books includes: Aunt Serena
(1881); Guenn: a Wave on the Breton Coast
(1883) ; Aulnay Tower (1885) ; Tony the Maid
(1887) ; The Open Door (1889); A Battle and
a Boy (1892) ; A Fellowe and His Wife (1892),
with William Sharp; No Heroes (1893); Seven
on the Highway (1897) ; Dionysius the Weaver's
Heart's Dearest (1899)»" The Garden of Eden
(1900); The Humming Top; or, Debit and
Credit in the Next World (1903), translated
from Theobald Gross. Her novels, popular for
two decades, went through large editions in the
United States, and were translated into a num-
ber of European languages. They are idealistic
in atmosphere and characterization. The scenes
of her earlier tales are American, those of the
later, European. She portrays with especial
sympathy and skill the life of the peasants of the
Baltic and the Tyrol, which she knew from fre-
quent visits. Her best book is probably Dionysius
the Weaver's Heart's Dearest. During her later
years her home was in Munich, where she died.

[F. E. Willard and M. A. Livermore, Portraits and

Howard

Biogs. of Prominent Am. Women (1897); Heman
Howard, The Howard Geneal. (1903); Geneal. and
Family Hist, of the State of Me. (4 vols., 1909) • if y
Tribune, Oct. n, 1898, N. Y. Times, Oct. 10, 1898.] '

C p -o

HOWARD, BRONSON CROCKER (Oct.
7, i8^2-Aug. 4, 1908), playwright, was born in
Detroit, Mich., the son of Charles and Margaret
(Vosburgh) Howard. He came of good stock;
his great-grandfather fought in the French and
Indian War and fell in the Revolution at Mon-
mouth; his father was mayor of Detroit. In this
city and at Russell's Institute, New Haven,
Conn., the boy had his schooling, and in Detroit
he did his first writing—on the Detroit Free
Press—and produced his first play—in 1864:
Fantine, a dramatization of an episode from Les
Miserable^. He went to New York the next year
and supported himself by newspaper work until
the time of his first dramatic success, December
1870, when his Saratoga, a social farce comedy,
was produced at Augustin Daly's Fifth Avenue
Theatre, starting a run of a hundred and one
nights. After two relatively unsuccessful ven-
tures, he produced the first form of the drama of
which he wrote revealingly and at length in his
essay The Autobiography of a Play. This was
Lillian's Last Love, produced in Chicago in 1873,
and then rewritten and revived with notable suc-
cess as The Banker's Daughter at Palmer's Union
Square Theatre in New York in 1878. On Oct
28, 1880, in London, he was married to Alice
Wyndham.

The next production which contributed sig-
nificantly to his reputation was Young Mrs.
Winthrop, a play of domestic complications in a
family of the New York elite. It was produced
in the Madison Square Theatre in October 1882,
and, without change, in the Court Theatre, Lon-
don, the following month. One of Our Girls,
which had a run of two hundred nights, begin-
ning in November 1885 at the Lyceum Theatre,
was set against the international social back-
ground then established in the novel by Henry
James and W. D. Howells, and later used in such
plays as Clyde Fitch's Her Great Match. The
Henrietta, produced at the Union Square Thea-
tre, September 1887, established Howard's in-
creasing claim to popular favor. It returned to
the interweaving motifs of finance and family
employed in The Banker's Daughter, flourished
in the hands of Stuart Robson and W. H. Crane,
and in its initial run of sixty-eight weeks brought
just short of a half million dollars to the box of-
fice. Howard's final achievement of note was
his Shenandoah, a war play that rivaled Wil-
liam Gillette's Held by the Enemy and Secret
Service. It was produced at the Boston Museum

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