Background
Elinor Gertrude Mead was born on May 1, 1837 in Chesterfield, New Hampshire to Mary Jane Noyes and Larkin Goldsmith Mead.
Elinor Gertrude Mead was born on May 1, 1837 in Chesterfield, New Hampshire to Mary Jane Noyes and Larkin Goldsmith Mead.
She graduated from Brattleboro High School in Brattleboro, Vermont.
Her family was part of the intellectual and social aristocracy of New England. Her brothers were sculptor Larkin Goldsmith Mead (born 1835) and architect William Rutherford Mead (born 1846). During the winter of 1860, Mead travelled to Columbus to stay with Laura Platt, a niece of Hayes".
She met author William Dean Howells there.
Their children were Winifred (b 1863), architect John Mead Howells (b 1868), and Mildred (b 1872). The Howells moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1866 and lived in a house a few blocks north of Harvard University.
Elinor Howells was the architect and interior designer for the William Dean Howells House located at 37 Concord Avenue. Their family moved into the home on July 7, 1873.
Following her husband"s success as a writer, authors including Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Henry James, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Bret Harte, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich visited their home, as did President James Garfield.
She saw both Samuel Clemens and Henry James frequently, corresponding often with Clemens as well as Susan Warner, the spouse of essayist Charles Dudley Warner. The Howells family left Cambridge in 1878 and moved to Redtop in Belmont, Massachusetts. They travelled to Europe in 1882 and relocated frequently thereafter.
By 1900, they had purchased a home near Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Howells had lifelong health problems. In February 1910, she began using morphine to treat her worsening neuritis.
She died on May 6, 1910 in New New York Around 200 of Elinor Howells" letters are extant.
The 1988 book If Not Literature: Letters of Elinor Mead Howells includes 130 of her letters.