The Story of My Life

Summary

The Story of My Life is Helen Keller's account of her first twenty-two years, written while she was a student at Radcliffe College. She begins at Ivy Green, the family home in Tuscumbia, Alabama, where she was born on June 27, 1880. In February of her second year an illness the doctor called acute congestion of the stomach and brain left her unable to see or hear. She describes the years that followed: a child who explored the world with her hands, invented some sixty home signs, played and quarrelled with Martha Washington, the cook's daughter, and fell into fits of temper as her wish to communicate outgrew her signs. Her parents take her to Dr. Chisholm, an oculist in Baltimore, who sends them to Alexander Graham Bell, who directs them to Michael Anagnos of the Perkins Institution in Boston. On March 3, 1887, Anne Mansfield Sullivan arrives. She spells words into Helen's hand, and after weeks of struggle, including a broken doll, the breakthrough comes at the well-house, when cold water runs over one hand while Sullivan spells w-a-t-e-r into the other. Helen learns that everything has a name, and that evening feels sorrow for the doll for the first time. Later chapters tell of lessons out of doors, learning to read raised print, a terrifying thunderstorm in a wild cherry tree, the meaning of the word love, a first Christmas, visits to Boston and the sea at Brewster, and learning to speak in 1890 with Sarah Fuller of the Horace Mann School. In 1892 a story she wrote, The Frost King, proves to resemble Margaret Canby's The Frost Fairies, which had been read to her years before; a committee at Perkins questions her, and the episode leaves her afraid of her own thoughts for years. She visits the 1893 World's Fair with Dr. Bell, studies at the Wright-Humason School for the Deaf in New York and the Cambridge School for Young Ladies, prepares with the tutor Merton S. Keith, passes the Radcliffe examinations, and enters college in the fall of 1900. The final chapters describe her love of books, her pleasures in rowing, sailing, riding a tandem bicycle and visiting museums, and her friends, among them Phillips Brooks, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier, Edward Everett Hale and Mark Twain. The chapters first appeared in The Ladies' Home Journal in 1902 and were published as a book by Doubleday, Page in 1903. The editor, John Albert Macy, added a second part of her letters from 1887 to 1901 and a third part with Anne Sullivan's letters and reports on her teaching, and the library text includes all three.

Top Lessons

• A word can open a world

  At the well-house Helen learns that the spelling in her hand means the water on her skin, and at once everything around her has a name. Her whole education follows from that day. The story shows how much of what we think and feel depends on having words.

• A good teacher is patient and wise

  Anne Sullivan spells into Helen's hand for weeks before Helen understands, teaches out of doors, and waits for the right moment. Helen writes that her teacher's sympathy and tact made learning a joy. The book honors teaching as a gift of love.

• Every struggle is a victory

  Learning to speak, preparing for Radcliffe, and studying with books that were not in braille all took Helen enormous effort. In Chapter XX she says she slips back and falls but keeps climbing. She treats hard work as part of the climb rather than a reason to stop.

• Friends shape a life

  Helen fills her last chapter with thanks to friends who read to her, wrote to her, and believed in her. She says such people make us feel that all is well. Her story suggests that no one becomes who they are alone.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The Story of My Life is a central first-person document in the history of deafblindness and its education. Keller records the family's account of the illness of February 1882, called acute congestion of the stomach and brain, with high fever and an apparently sudden recovery; later writers have suggested meningitis or scarlet fever, but these are retrospective readings, not established diagnoses. The book traces the medical and educational network of the 1880s: the Baltimore oculist Dr. Chisholm, who found nothing to be done for her eyes but said she could be educated; Alexander Graham Bell; and the Perkins Institution, where Laura Bridgman's earlier education by touch supplied the method. Keller describes how she perceived through touch, smell and vibration, learned to speak by feeling the throat and lips of Sarah Fuller, and read speech from lips with her fingers. Her account of the Frost King hearing and the years of fear afterwards that her thoughts were not her own describes a lasting anxiety about memory and unconscious borrowing (cryptomnesia is the later term some use). Macy's supplementary account and Sullivan's letters are early documents in the psychology of language acquisition. A passage on dreams describes how a person who has been deafblind since infancy dreams in touch and feeling.

• Part I, Chapter I

  The fever in her second year, the doctor's verdict, and her confused memory of turning her hot, dry eyes from the light.

• Part I, Chapter III

  The visit to the oculist Dr. Chisholm in Baltimore and to Dr. Bell in Washington.

• Part I, Chapter XIII

  Learning to speak in 1890 by feeling the position of Sarah Fuller's tongue and lips.

• Part I, Chapter XIV

  The Frost King hearing and her long afterward fear that her ideas were not her own.

• Part III, Chapter IV

  Macy and Sullivan on how Keller's speech was taught and how she reads lips with her fingers.

• Part III, Chapter V

  Keller's description of her dreams and how the senses she lacks appear in them.