Olivia Langdon, familiarly called “Livy,” was born and raised in Elmira, New York, the daughter of wealthy coal merchant Jervis Langdon and Olivia Lewis Langdon. The Langdons were strongly religious, reformist, and abolitionist. Livy’s education, in the 1850s and 1860s, was a combination of home tutoring and classes at Thurston’s Female Seminary and Elmira Female College. Always delicate, her health deteriorated into invalidism for a time between 1860 and 1864. “She was never strong again while her life lasted,” SLC said in 1906. SLC was first introduced to the shy and serious Livy in December 1867; he soon began an earnest and protracted courtship, conducted largely through letters. They married in February 1870 and settled in Buffalo, New York, in a house purchased for them by Livy’s father; their first child, Langdon Clemens, was born there in November. In 1871 they moved, as renters, to the Nook Farm neighborhood of Hartford, Connecticut, and quickly became an integral part of the social life of that literary and intellectual enclave. They purchased land and built the distinctive house which was their home from 1874 to 1891. Young Langdon died in 1872, but three daughters were born: Olivia Susan (Susy) in 1872, Clara in 1874, and Jane (Jean) in 1880. Clara later recalled her mother’s “unselfish, tender nature—combined with a complete understanding, both intellectual and human, of her husband”; she took “care of everything pertaining to house and home, which included hospitality to many guests,” and made “time for lessons in French and German as well as hours for reading aloud to my sisters and me.” To her adoring husband, whom she addressed fondly as “Youth,” Livy was “my faithful, judicious, and painstaking editor.” In June 1891, with their expenses mounting and SLC’s investments draining his earnings as well as Livy’s personal income, they permanently closed the Hartford house and left for a period of retrenchment in Europe; thenceforth Livy’s life was spent in temporary quarters, hotel suites, and rented houses. When SLC was forced to declare bankruptcy in April 1894, the family’s financial future was salvaged by the expedient of giving Livy “preferred creditor” status and assigning all SLC’s copyrights to her. In 1895–96 she and Clara accompanied SLC on his round-the-world lecture tour. The death of her daughter Susy in 1896 was a blow from which she never recovered. She died of heart failure in Italy in June 1904.