Julia Ward Howe published her first book of poetry on December 23, 1853, when she was thirty-four years old. It must have made a rather nice Christmas present for her husband, Samuel Gridley Howe, a distinguished doctor who had recently been rejected by the same press and who had no clue that his wife was shopping a manuscript of her own. And not just any manuscript: Passion-Flowers was an intensely personal airing of desires and grievances, the catalogue of a mutually unsatisfying union. The one that got everyone in Boston talking was “Mind Versus Mill-Stream,” in which a miller looking…