In Boston, Julia met Samuel Gridley Howe, a physician and reformer who had founded

the Perkins School for the Blind.[2][7] Howe had courted her, but he had shown an
interest in her sister Louisa.[8] In 1843, they married despite their eighteen-year
age difference.[2] She gave birth to their first child while honeymooning in
Europe. She bore their last child in December 1859 at the age of forty. They had
six children: Julia Romana Howe (1844�1886), Florence Marion Howe (1845�1922),
Henry Marion Howe (1848�1922), Laura Elizabeth Howe (1850�1943), Maud Howe
(1855�1948), and Samuel Gridley Howe, Jr. (1859�1863). Julia was an aunt of
novelist Francis Marion Crawford.

Howe raised her children in South Boston, while her husband pursued his advocacy
work. She hid her unhappiness with their marriage earning the nickname "the family
champagne" from her children.[9] She made frequent visits to Gardiner, Maine where
she stayed at "The Yellow House," a home built originally in 1814 and later home to
her daughter Laura.[10]

In 1852, the Howes bought a "country home" with 4.7 acres of land in Portsmouth,
Rhode Island which they called "Oak Glen."[11] They continued to maintain homes in
Boston and Newport, but spent several months each year at Oak Glen.[11]

Writing

Portrait of Julia Ward Howe, by John Elliott, 1925

She attended lectures, studied foreign languages, and wrote plays and dramas. Julia
had published essays on Goethe, Schiller and Lamartine before her marriage in the
New York Review and Theological Review.[2] Passion-Flowers was published
anonymously in 1853. The book collected personal poems and was written without the
knowledge of her husband, who was then editing the Free Soil newspaper The
Commonwealth.[12] Her second anonymous collection, Words for the Hour, appeared in
1857.[2] She went on to write plays such as Leonora, The World's Own, and
Hippolytus. These works all contained allusions to her stultifying marriage.[2]

She went on trips including several for missions. In 1860, she published, A Trip to
Cuba, which told of her 1859 trip. It had generated outrage from William Lloyd
Garrison, an abolitionist, for its derogatory view of Blacks. Julia believed it was
right to free the slaves but did not believe in racial equality.[13] Several
letters on High Newport society were published in the New York Tribune in 1860, as
well.[2]

Howe's being a published author troubled her husband greatly, especially due to the
fact th