Searching for Proud Antoinette: Evidence and Prospects for Whitman’s Phantom Novel

In 1962, while looking through the Feinberg Collection for fiction-related Whitman manuscripts, scholar William White came across a set of notes toward what appeared, to him, to be a short story. It is a tale about secret identities, murder, and prostitution, which White largely dismissed, along with Whitman’s fictions in general, as “melodramatic, sentimental [and] moralizing.”1 While the story itself would not turn up for White—nor does he sound especially hopeful that it will—nevertheless, the notes he discovered have turned out to be very valuable manuscripts indeed. Four pages in total, likely written in 1858 or 1859, these notes appear on the back of the canceled newspaper notice Whitman had drafted for a proposed men’s wellness series (a subject to which Whitman often returns in his notes of the period). However, neither the story nor the series were thought to have eventuated. Ultimately, these manuscripts were collected in Edward F. Grier’s six-volume collection of Whitman’s Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, where their presence would lead, in 2016, to the recovery of the very wellness series Whitman had proposed: Manly Health and Training, a 47,000-word work of journalism he had serialized, under a pen name, in late 1858.2 It is one of the latest in a string of rediscoveries of Whitman’s unknown journalistic work. Yet, I would like to suggest that these same manuscript pages may yield additional discoveries. The evidence they contain—of Whitman’s having constructed the foundations of a substantial sensation fiction—suggest that he may have been more serious about novel-writing in the late 1850s than scholars have previously thought. The fate of that fiction, a romantic murder mystery the poet tentatively titles Proud Antoinette: A New York Romance of To-Day, is unknown.3 But its odds of having been completed, even published, have increased substantially since the discovery, in 2017, of Whitman’s previously unknown sensation novella, Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, published while he was composing the first edition of Leaves of Grass.4 Whitman’s journalism and fiction of the mid-to-late 1850s