Fanny Howe notebooks

Fanny Howe (born 1940) is an award-winning poet, novelist, memoirist, and filmmaker. She is the author of over 50 books of poetry and prose, including Manimal Woe (2021), Love and I (2019), Needle’s Eye: Passing Through Youth (2016), Second Childhood (2014), The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation (2009), The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life (2003) and Indivisible (2000).

Howe was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1940, and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her father Mark De Wolfe Howe was a professor at Harvard Law School, a WWII veteran, an active civil rights lawyer, and the first Charles Warren Professor in the History of American Law. Her mother Mary (“Molly”) Manning Howe acted in the Gate Theatre, Dublin, before emigrating to the United States, where she founded the experimental Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge. Fanny Howe’s sisters—Susan Howe and Helen Howe Braider—are also artists.

The notebooks and journals in this collection begin in the Boston area, around the time of her father’s death (in 1967) and her marriage to writer and civil rights activist Carl Senna (in 1968). The materials proceed to document the births and raising of her three children, the development of her philosophical, political, and spiritual ideas—including her first encounter with the work of Simone Weil (in 1970) and her conversion to Catholicism (in 1982)—and the research and thinking behind a range of Howe’s poetry and essay collections, novels, and films. The journals also follow Howe as she moves to San Diego in 1989 to assume a tenured faculty position at UCSD and her subsequent return to the East Coast after her retirement in 2000.

Over the course of her active writing life and career, Howe attended Stanford University and taught at Tufts University, Emerson College, Kenyon College, Columbia University, Yale University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Georgetown University.

After University of California, San Diego, she spent several years traveling, teaching, and writing in such locations as West Tisbury (Martha’s Vineyard, where she purchased a cottage in 1998; later sold in 2015), New York City, Washington, DC, London, and as an annual resident (for over 22 years) at Glenstal Abbey, County Limerick, Ireland. From 2010-2019, she resided in West Cambridge, with frequent visits to see her children in Oxford, England (Ann Lucien Senna); Pasadena, California (Danzy Senna); and Martha’s Vineyard/Brookline/Santa Cruz (Maceo Senna). At the time of this donation, she resided in West Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Source: This biographical note was written by Woodberry Poetry Room curator Christina Davis, based on conversations with Fanny Howe.