Some Memories of a Long Life, 1854-1911

February 11, 2002
These memoirs by the wife of a noted Supreme Court justice, John Marshall Harlan, first appeared last summer in the Journal of Supreme Court History
and gained considerable attention thanks to Ruth Bader Ginsburg's enthusiastic support. Now they are being made available in a popular edition complete with foreword by Ginsburg (not seen by PW) and extensive notes by Przybyszewski. Justice Harlan, though a former slave-holder, is remembered for his lone and eloquent dissent in Plessy
v. Ferguson, the case that established the doctrine of "separate but equal." His wife's recollections of her married life shed considerable light on the complexities inherent in race relations in America and help explain such an apparent contradiction. Mrs. Harlan was a conventional woman; she shared the unreflecting assumptions of white superiority and wifely subordination common to her class. Indeed her decision, at 50, to visit Italy without her husband's express permission was so uncharacteristic that it went down in family annals as "Mother's Revolt," while her portraits of the slaves in her father-in-law's household, though well intentioned, will produce nothing but deep embarrassment in the contemporary reader. Nevertheless, she stood squarely behind her husband's dissent. No visionary, Malvina Harlan was a thoroughly nice woman who behaved as she knew she should. Her journals will most interest students of the period. Photos not seen by PW. (May)Forecast:Clearly, Modern Library is counting on the clout of Justice Ginsburg's name to help sell the book, as the announced first printing of 75,000 copies attests.

January 1, 2002
This is the sort of book you call a publishing event. It is a recently unearthed memoir by the wife of Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan, graced with a foreword by Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Copyright 2001 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2002
This publisher has wisely brought to light a never-before-published memoir that languished for many years in the Library of Congress. Malvina Shanklin Harlan was the wife of John Marshall Harlan of Kentucky, a U.S. Supreme Court Justice of note who served on that preeminent bench from 1877 to 1911. Her penned recollections are the story of her married life, beginning with the year she met her husband and ending with the year he died. Remembered here are border-state politics and racial attitudes that existed before the Civil War and emancipation as well as the domestic side of life as led in high-society Washington, D.C., during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. From the dusty archives where it lay forgotten for so long, her memoir emerges as an important social document--an accurate reflection of the manners and mores of the writer's time, place, and milieu.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)