Hannah Whitman Heyde

“Much of the most revealing recent scholarship on Walt Whitman has been dedicated to opening up and fully humanizing the fascinating group of people who surrounded the poet throughout his life, including his wildly diverse siblings. Maire Mullins’ inspired collection of Whitman’s younger sister Hannah’s letters—along with Mullins’ chilling introductory essay about how Hannah’s life illuminates nineteenth-century intimate partner violence—bring Hannah fully and achingly to life, and, in so doing, highlight anew the deep empathy of her brother Walt, who cared for her when no one else did. The Hannah that emerges in Mullins’ eye-opening book undoes the whining one-dimensional figure that has inhabited Whitman biographies for the past century.”

— Ed Folsom, coauthor of Re-Scripting Walt Whitman: An Introduction to his Life and Work

“[A]n indispensable resource for future Whitman scholars.”— Walt Whitman Quarterly Review

"Maire Mullins' edition brings Walt Whitman's sister Hannah into well-deserved cultural visibility. Bravo to Mullins for this eye-opening contribution to Whitman studies and to feminist historiography. She argues persuasively that Hannah was an important member of the close-knit Whitman family."

— Vivian Pollak, author of Our Emily Dickinsons: American Women Poets and the Intimacies of Difference

“Valuable as a cultural/historical document, as testimony to the largely untold suffering of abused women; important as a source for people interested in studying Walt Whitman; the book is also worth reading as a story, a work of unselfconscious art.”— The Hollins Critic

"Hannah Whitman Heyde, sister of Walt Whitman and wife of landscape painter Charles Heyde, has been dismissed as 'neurotic' or 'psychotic' by unsympathetic scholars. Mullins' edition of her correspondence brings her into clarity as a victim of long-term intimate partner violence whose primary survival strategy was writing to her adored brother and mother."

— Kenneth Price, author of Whitman in Washington: Becoming the National Poet in the Federal City

"Hannah Whitman Heyde’s Complete Correspondence is a powerful addition to Walt Whitman family correspondence, one with which future biographers must reckon. Hannah was not a masochist, psychotic, or neurotic, though these are all ways that prominent Whitman biographers have described her. Instead, Maire Mullins’s complete collection of Hannah’s letters demonstrate that Whitman biographer consensus relies too much on the testimony of Hannah’s husband, the landscape artist Charles Louis Heyde, who is revealed in her letters as a venomous snake. Hannah’s lifelong struggle, with minimal family support, was against intimate partner psychological abuse and physical violence, and against the weight of public opinion that made the truth about her marriage unspeakable in her era. Like Virginia Woolf’s imaginary sister to Shakespeare, the great American poet Walt Whitman had a favorite sister, but much documentary evidence about Hannah’s life survives, and it tells a story with immediate relevance in the #metoo era."

— Wesley Raabe, editor of 'walter dear': The Letters from Louisa Van Velsor Whitman to Her Son Walt