Passion-Flowers

Julia Ward Howe was an American poet and author best known for writing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic", but she was also an advocate for abolitionism and a social activist, particularly for women's suffrage. Her first book of poetry, a compendium of emotional and person poetry called Passion-Flowers, was complied in secret and published anonymously in 1854 with help from Longfellow and Ticknor. Her husband was not pleased with the nearly erotic and emotional poetry and found it scandalous - in fact, other proper Bostonians thought the same. Nathaniel Hawthorne opined that Howe "ought to have been soundly whipped" for publishing it! Many of the reprints of Passion-Flowers found some of the poems tweaked or retitled to soothe her marriage, although her husband never truly forgave her for being a more successful poet and writer than himself.

First published with only 1,000 copies in Boston by Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1854 with brown blindstamped cloth and gilt lettering on the spine. The book was so popular that there was a second and third print run in 1854.