SOURCE: Skandera-Trombley, Laura E. “The Charmed Circie.” In Mark Twain in the Company of Women, pp. 30-34. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994.

In this excerpt, Skandera-Trombley discusses the effects of women and women's fiction on the composition of Huckleberry Finn.

Mary Ann Cord played a crucial role in the shaping of Clemens's fiction. Born enslaved in Virginia, Cord had been sold twice and had all her children taken from her before she escaped to the North (Jerome and Wisbey 8). Charles Langdon's daughter, Ida Langdon, in an address delivered to the Elmira College Convocation in 1960, remembered Cord as a “dogmatic Methodist” (Jerome and Wisbey 62). Cord was very likely a member of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the first African-American church founded in Elmira in 1841 (Sorin 15). And indeed Cord's denomination is shared by Roxana in Pudd'nhead Wilson; it is Roxana's recent conversion to Methodism that saves her from being...