<i>Gravity: Selected Letters of Olivia Langdon Clemens</i>, edited by Barbara Snedecor

It's not often that an academic volume can be accurately described as lling a void or o ering a new and necessary contribution; Gravity: Selected Le ers of Olivia Langdon Clemens, edited by Barbara Snedecor, is just such a volume.Since critics rst began to explore the life and work of Mark Twain in the early decades of the twentieth century, Olivia Langdon has been an object of critical examination.She's been represented as a humorless censor, an angel in the house, a carping schoolmarm, and a beati c muse.Van Wyck Brooks, in The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1922), begins something of a critical trend when he caricatures Olivia Langdon as the product of "a stagnant, fresh-water aristocracy.""She was more than a person," Brooks writes, "she was a symbol."Brooks casts Olivia Langdon as something of an emasculating tyrant, who undermines the authentic genius of Twain.She appeared in this early criticism as an instrument of su ocating, censoring femininity in the abstract, a metaphor rather than a person.Feminist critics and biographers-