Her famous father called her willful, troubled and pathetic. Her older sisters were better known. She spent her life suffering attempted cures for epilepsy at a time when that disorder was hardly understood.
Jean Clemens, youngest daughter of Olivia and Samuel (Mark Twain), periodically lamented that she hadn’t accomplished anything worthwhile. Even today, if she’s remembered, it’s mostly for dying in her bathtub at Clemens’ Connecticut mansion in Redding.
But there’s probably a lesson in this for the rest of us.
She was born July 26, 1880, and early on showed a proficiency for languages and business. At age 8, she suggested to a maid that the household not buy shoe polish until one of her father’s investments paid off.
But as she grew, seizures took over, and her personality went from persistent to sullen, according to her bewildered father.
In retrospect, her family was overprotective. Her father discouraged her from pursuing a career or from forming romantic attachments – restrictions against which Jean chafed. She asserted herself to the point that her father found her incorrigible, though his characterization of his daughter may have come from his inability to deal with epilepsy, says Kerry Driscoll, chair of St. Joseph College’s English department, who is researching Clemens’ relationship with Native Americans.
Add to that the accomplishments of her sisters, said Patti Philippon, the Mark Twain House & Museum’s Beatrice Fox Auerbach chief curator. The oldest Clemens daughter, Susy, who died young of meningitis, most resembled her father in temperament and talent. At 13, she wrote a biography of her father. She staged plays in their stately Hartford home. Middle daughter Clara outlived them all and served as a strict guardian to her father’s legacy, said Philippon. (The Clemens’ only son, Langdon, died at 18 months and is rarely mentioned in Twain scholarship.)
“And then there’s Jean,” said Philippon, “and she’s neither long-lived, tragically young or as creative and outgoing as Susy. She was institutionalized and out of the public eye a lot.”
In fact, Jean was an animal-rights activist and founded or contributed to animal-aid societies in every town in which she lived. She was also an accomplished wood carver; the museum has on display some of her woodwork.
She was dismissive of her carving, but like the artist, it is intricate and complicated and beautiful.
In her late 20s, Jean left a New York sanitarium and joined her then-widowed father in Ridgefield, where she proved to be excellent at keeping the family books and answering mail. Clemens began to warm to his daughter, and the “pathetic” offspring became a “surprise” and a “wonder.”
And then, on Christmas Eve 1909, Jean called the Associated Press to refute yet another rumor that her father was ill. She feared the rumors would reach and worry sister Clara, then living in Germany. She and her father jokingly kissed one another’s hand good night and retired to their respective rooms. Jean was found dead in her bath the next morning, perhaps of complications from her disorder.
Clemens could not bring himself to attend Jean’s funeral. Instead, he watched the hearse leave for the family plot in Elmira, N.Y.
In an heartbreaking essay called “The Death of Jean” he wrote: “Possibly I know now what the soldier feels when a bullet crashes through his heart.”
It would be among his last published works.
