Nancy Jackson

Boyhood is the most familiar province of Mark Twain’s fiction, but a reader doesn’t have to look far to find feminine territory--and it’s not the perfectly neat and respectable place where you’d expect to see Becky Thatcher. This is a fictional world where rather than polishing their domestic arts and waiting for marriage proposals, girls are fighting battles, riding stallions, rescuing boys from rivers, cross-dressing, debating religion, hunting, squaring off against angry bulls, or, in what may be the most flagrant flouting of Victorian convention, marrying other women. This special edition brings together the best of Twain’s stories about unconventional girls and women, from Eve as she names the animals in Eden to Joan of Arc to the transvestite farce of a young man named Alice from the Wapping district of London. Whatever they’re doing--bopping boys with a baseball bat in ＂Hellfire Hotchkiss,＂ treating the author to a life story and a dogsled ride in ＂The Esquimau Maiden’s Romance,＂ or sacrificing all for the sake of a horse, as in ＂A Horse’s Tale＂--these women and girls are surprising, provocative, and irresistibly entertaining in the great Twain tradition in which they now finally take their rightful place.

Mark Twain (1835-1910) was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, and drew on a boyhood spent on the Mississippi and brief careers as a journalist, river boat pilot, and prospector for material for his works, many of which are considered classics of American literature, including Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Editor and Twain scholar John Cooley is a professor of English at Western Michigan University. His books include Mark Twain’s Aquarium: The Samuel Clemens Angelfish Correspondence, 1905-1910 and Earthly Words: Essays on Contemporary American Nature and Environmental Writers.