Maud Howe Elliott

Born in Boston in 1854, she was the daughter of reformers Julia Ward Howe and Samuel Gridley Howe, and she grew up in a household deeply involved in public life. She later married the English artist John Elliott and became known as an American writer whose work ranged across fiction, travel writing, memoir, and biography.

She is best remembered for collaborating with her sisters Laura E. Richards and Florence Howe Hall on The Life of Julia Ward Howe (1916), the biography of their mother. That work earned the first Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1917 and remains the achievement most closely linked to her name.

Her life also reached beyond books. Sources describe her as active in the arts and in women's civic and political work, especially in Rhode Island, where she was associated with the Newport Art Association and with suffrage activism. That mix of literary accomplishment and public engagement gives her story an energy that still feels vivid today.