Annie Adams Fields

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Annie Adams Fields, around 1880
James Thomas Fields, photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron around 1869
Sarah Orne Jewett, around 1880
The Atlantic Monthly Publishing House , Tremont Street, Boston, 1873

Annie Adams Fields (born June 6, 1834 in Boston , Massachusetts ; † January 5, 1915 ) was an American writer who, in addition to her own literary work, promoted the careers of young writers and also theirs as the host of an important Boston literary salon Biographies or rebate issued.

Life

Annie Adams Fields was born on June 6, 1834, the daughter and sixth of seven children of doctor Dr. Born Zabdiel Boylston Adams and his wife Sarah May Holland Adams. Both parents were able to trace their family tree back to the Pilgrim Fathers . Growing up in a distinguished and well-to-do family, Annie Adams experienced a sheltered childhood, during which she was first taught at home by private tutors. Only later did she receive lessons at the then famous George B. Emersons private school.

Annie Fields married in 1854 at the age of 20 the editor and author James Thomas Fields , whom she had known since childhood, 17 years her senior . She was the cousin of his first wife, Eliza Willard, who had died of tuberculosis in 1851 after only a year of marriage . Despite the great age difference, both of them had a happy partnership for the time, in which he never tire of giving his wife little gifts. Together with him, she encouraged and promoted young, unknown writers such as B. Sarah Orne Jewett , Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman, and Emma Lazarus . She was also familiar and close friends with important figures in the literary scene of the time, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Harriet Beecher Stowe , whose biography she wrote. Thanks to their jointly cultivated network , the couple Fields caused 31 publications in The Atlantic monthly by women in the 1860s alone .

After James Fields died in 1881, thanks to an annual income of $ 124,000 , she continued his work unimpeded by becoming the center of Boston literary life. As a small-scale writer, she ran the most important literary salon in Boston in her painting studio on 148th Charles Street. The rooms were filled with rare books, first editions , marble busts, and oil paintings - an almost perfect backdrop for the closest possible approach to a literary salon North America should ever get to know. Even if she became somewhat decisive in her later life, like her late husband she had a sense of responsibility, a good sense of humor and warm sympathy, which kept her literary circle together. Her own works are characterized by a compassionate understanding for her friends, almost all of whom were among the leading writers of their time.

Her closest friend and lover was Sarah Orne Jewett , a novel and short story writer whose work Fields' husband had previously edited on The Atlantic . After the death of her father, who was her only male caregiver, Jewett had confided in Fields as her closest friend, with whom she had "a relationship that was partially tolerated by society at the time," a Boston Marriage . In retrospect, both relationships were even referred to as personifications of the Boston Marriage . Annie Adams Fields went on long trips to Italy , Greece and France with her friend , spent the summer regularly in Manchester , sponsored the Christmas parties on Beacon Hill in Boston in the winter and continued her own literary work more seriously. Fields and Jewett stayed together until Jewett died in 1909. Their coexistence was always characterized by extraordinary mutual consideration. For example, when it turned out that Horace Scudder (1838–1902), a successful editor of Riverside Magazine for Young People and the Atlantic Monthly and close friend of Jewett, paid Fields less money for comparable articles than Jewett, they intervened in the interests of Fields', to appease her disgruntled friend. When Jewett died, Willa Cather noted in a letter that Fields could not accept their death because of their mutual devotional love, while Jewett himself was increasingly afraid that Fields would die first of the two.

Both were on friendly terms with many other writers, including Willa Cather , Mary Ellen Chase , Louise Imogen Guiney , William Dean Howells , Henry James , Rudyard Kipling , Harriet Beecher Stowe, Celia Thaxter , Alfred Tennyson , Oliver Wendell Holmes , Mark Twain , Sarah Wyman Whitman , Henry Wadsworth Longfellow , Nathaniel Hawthorne , Lydia Maria Child and John Greenleaf Whittier . Annie Fields already had a particularly good relationship during her childless marriage to Hawthorne's wife, Sophia, due to her attachment to their children, which continued after Nathaniel's death. With Annie's husband James T. Fields, however, Sophia had already fallen out over financial disagreements over the settlement of the literary estate.

In addition to all the writers, her circle included politicians such as Charles Sumner , actors and musicians such as Charlotte Cushman or Ole Bull, and scientists such as Louis Agassiz and William Osler during her husband's life and later .

Fields is described as a confident, multi-talented philanthropist who recognized and encouraged talent in others. Although she occasionally appears in poetry anthologies of the 19th century, her most important works remain the short biographies she wrote about her friends. Along with the empathy that makes these works special, there is the thoughtful critical faculty that brings us closer to the nineteenth century as Samuel Johnson did a century earlier.

The literary significance of Annie Adams Fields lies on two levels: first, when she and her husband selected the works to be published by Ticknor and Fields, the largest publishing house in North America at the time. In doing so, he supported her judgment in the self-perception of the role of women in American society. She later edited important collections of correspondence and biographies on the literary culture of the United States. Even if these works were not critical editions and some of them, such as Jewett's letter collection, are quite difficult to access, it gave future generations a wealth of material for future study. As far as we know today, the best accessible are her biographical sketches Authors and Friends , in which those about Harriet Beecher Stowe and Celia Thaxter should be emphasized. Fields' own diaries have remained unpublished to this day, apart from excerpts that Mark DeWolfe Howe published in 1922 under the title Memories of a Hostess . Her own literary achievements are to be called rather heterogeneous, as she remained more attached to traditions while at the same time promoting emancipated women authors.

Portrait of Annie Adams Fields, painted by John Singer Sargent , 1890, Concord Museum, Treasures from the Boston Athenaeum Fine Arts Collection

In 1872, the philanthropist also founded the still existing non-profit organization, the Holly Tree Inns , a system of restaurants in the northeastern United States where the needy could drink and eat cheaply, as well as the Lincoln Street Home . Single workers could live there safely at reasonable prices. The name Holly Tree Inn was a reference to Charles Dickens ' short story The Boots at the Holly Tree Inn from 1855, who in 1868 assured her of his enduring love because of her great friendliness to the British "Wanderer". In general, her social commitment set the trend for general welfare projects in Boston, as she was one of the founding members of the Associated Charities of Boston in 1879 . Her handbook for welfare workers How to help the poor from 1883 sold 20,000 copies in two years. She was director of the Associated Charities of Boston from the founding year until 1894 and then as vice president until 1906.

Annie Adams Fields died of arteriosclerosis and myocarditis in her apartment on Charles Street in 1915, aged 80 . In her will , she left the largest single amount of $ 40,000 to the Associated Charities of Boston . After her death, the 17th century house was sold and demolished; only the garden remained untouched according to her last will. She found her final resting place in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge , next to her late husband.

On the occasion of her death, Henry James wrote an obituary , which tellingly, however, was for the Fields couple.

Annie Adams Fields had four siblings who reached adulthood, one of whom was the general practitioner and military doctor of the Civil War , Zabdiel Boylston Adams Jr. (1829-1902), and the essayist and translator Sarah Holland Adams (1826-1916) who were in her childhood suffered from polio and later lived for around two decades in Weimar , where she translated the works of Herman Grimm into English, are of interest. All sisters, including the painter "Lissie" Elizabeth (* 1827) and the youngest, Louisa (* 1838), stayed in close written contact.

Works

  • Ode . 1863.
  • Asphodel . 1866.
  • The Children of Lebanon . 1872.
  • James T. Fields, Biographical Notes and Personal Sketches . 1881.
  • Under the olive . Poems 1881.
  • Whittier, Notes of His Life and of His Friendship . 1883.
  • How to Help the Poor . 1883 (about her charitable work).
  • A Week Away from Time . (Written anonymously with other authors) 1887.
  • A Shelf of Old Books . 1894.
  • The Letters of Celia Thaxter . Together ed. with R. Lamb, 1895.
  • The Singing Shepherd, and Other Poems . Poems, 1895.
  • Authors and Friends . 1896.
  • Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe . Edited by Fields, 1897.
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne . 1899.
  • Orpheus: A Masque . 1900.
  • The Return of Persephone and Orpheus . 1900.
  • Charles Dudley Warner . 1904.
  • Editor of: Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett . 1911.
  • Memories of a hostess . Edited by MD Howe, 1922.
  • Annie Adams Fields' unpublished diaries, spanning intermittently from 1859 to 1863 and then continuously through 1878, are owned by the Massachusetts Historical Society.
  • Your correspondence is widely scattered. However, a larger collection is in the Huntington Library, San Marino (California) .

literature

  • Willa Cather: Not Under Forty . 1936.
  • Rita Collin (Ed.): Annie Adams Fields: Woman of Letters . University Press of Massachusetts, Amherst / Boston 2002.
  • AE Davis: A Recovery of Connectedness in Annie Adams Fields' Authors and Friends and A Shelf of Old Books . 1998.
  • Susan K. Harris: The Cultural Work of the Late Nineteenth-Century Hostess: Annie Adams Fields and Mary Gladstone Drew . Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2002.
  • H. Howe: The Gentle Americans, 1864-1960: Biography of a Breed . 1965.
  • MD Howe: Memories of a Hostess . 1922.
  • Nathan I. Huggins: Private Charities in Boston. 1870-1900 . Phil. Diss. Harvard 1962.
  • A. Fields: Microfilm Edition of the Annie Adams Fields Papers, 1852-1912 ( Microfilm , 1981).
  • FO Matthiessen: Sarah Orne Jewett . 1929.
  • CL Nigro: Annie Adams Fields: Female Voice in a Male Chorus . 1996.
  • L. Richards: Stepping Westward . 1931.
  • Judith A. Roman: Annie Adams Fields: The Spirit of Charles Street . Indiana University Press, Bloomington / Indianapolis 1990.
  • HP Spofford: A Little Book of Friends . 1916.
  • WS Tryon: Parnassus Corner: A Life of James T. Fields . 1963.
  • HM Winslow: Literary Boston of Today . 1902.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ For example, Sharon M. Harris: Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism . University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia 1991, pp. 83 f.
  2. Whereby, of all people, an amusing refusal of an invitation is handed down. Only when he did the job expected of him did he accept such invitations; s. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Joel Myerson: The selected letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson . Columbia University Press, New York 1997, p. 451.
  3. In the literature you can find all kinds of information from 18 to 138 to 148 . See http://www.massbook.org/OnlineMap--New/GreaterMetro/Boston/fields_house.html
  4. Edward James, Janet Wilson James, Paul Samuel Boyer (Eds.): Notable american women: 1607-1950: a biographical dictionary. PZ . Volume 3, Belknap Press, Cambridge / London 1971, pp. 615-617.
  5. Ellery Sedgwick: The Atlantic monthly, 1857-1909: Yankee humanism at high tide and ebb . University of Massachusetts Press, 1994, p. 92.
  6. ^ Paula Blanchard: Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and Her Work . Radcliffe Biography Series. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Reading, Mass. 1994.
  7. Katja Buthut: Sylvia's decision in Sarah Orne Jewett's "A White Heron" . GRIN Verlag 2009, p. 7.
  8. Carol Brooks Gardner: Boston marriages . In: Jodi O'Brien (Ed.): Encyclopedia of gender and society . Vol. 2. SAGE Publications. P. 87 f.
  9. In comparison, the speculative discussions about the possibly asexual character of the relationship; Connie Torrisi: Portraits in Lavender: Flash Biographies of Some Famous Lesbians for the Newly Out Lesbian . 2009, p. 12 ff.
  10. ^ Robert Aldrich, Garry Wotherspoon: Who's who in gay and lesbian history: from antiquity to World War II . Routledge 2003, p. 272.
  11. The philanthropist Mary Elizabeth Garrett proved to be a knowledgeable travel guide; Kathleen Waters Sander: Mary Elizabeth Garrett: Society and Philanthropy in the Gilded Age . Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 2008, p. 222.
  12. Annie Adams-Fields . June 13, 2004. Archived from the original on September 7, 2008. Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved June 26, 2007. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / andrejkoymasky.com
  13. ^ Robert L. Gale: A Sarah Orne Jewett companion . Greenwood Press, Westport, Conn. u. a. 1999, p. 252.
  14. ^ Willa Cather: A calendar of the letters of Willa Cather . Edited by Janis P. Stout, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebraska 2002, p. 27.
  15. ^ Janis P. Stout: Willa Cather: the writer and her world . University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville 2000, pp. 98 ff.
  16. Den Fields was recommended by Parton in 1869 to bring more life to Atlantic Monthly ; Justin Kaplan: Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography . Simon and Schuster, New York 1991, p. 91.
  17. Compare the grateful correspondence; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: The letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow . Volume 5, ed. by Andrew R. Hilen, Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge Mass. 1992, p. 230 f.
  18. ^ Nicholas R. Lawrence, Marta L. Werner: Ordinary mysteries: the common journal of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne, 1842-1843 . American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia 2005, p. 18.
  19. ^ Sarah Bird Wright: Critical companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne: a literary reference to his life and work . Facts on file, New York 2007, p. 259.
  20. Monika Maria Elbert, Julie Elizabeth Hall, Katharine Rodier: Reinventing the Peabody sisters . University of Iowa press, Iowa City, p. 63.
  21. Claire Badaracco: Prescribing faith: medicine, media, and religion in American culture . Baylor University Press, Waco, Texas, 2007, p. 46.
  22. ^ Philip W. Leon: Sir William Osler; Medical humanist . Heritage Books, Westminster 2007, p. 59 f.
  23. Jessie Benton Frémont in a letter to Annie Adams Fields; Jessie Benton Frémont, Pamela Herr, Mary Lee Spence: The letters of Jessie Benton Frémont . University of Illinois Press 1992, pp. 325 f.
  24. Holly-Tree Inns. The System of Cheap Coffee Houses — what the Society of United Workers Propose to Do Here — Good Food at Reasonable Prices. Boston Daily Globe, December 14, 1872, p. 8.
  25. Cf. on the first attempts at public tea kitchens in the sense of welfare; Perry Duis: The saloon: public drinking in Chicago and Boston, 1880-1920 . University of Illinois Press, Urbana 1999, p. 198.
  26. ^ Rita K. Gollin: Annie Adams Fields, Woman of Letters . University of Massachusetts Press, Boston, Mass. 2002, ISBN 1-55849-313-1 . : therein, Holly Tree Inns and Lincoln Street Home, pp. 163-165.
  27. ^ Charles Dickens: The Letters of Charles Dickens: 1868-1870 . Edited by Madeline House, Graham Storey, Clarendon Press, Oxford et al. 2002, p. 18.
  28. Linda Gordon, Heroes of their own lives: the politics and history of family violence: Boston, 1880-1960 . University of Illinois Press, Urbana 2002, p. 62.
  29. Henry James: Mr. and Mrs. James T. Fields . Atlantic Monthly, July 1915.
  30. Caroline Wells Healey Dall, Helen Deese: Daughter of Boston: the extraordinary diary of a nineteenth-century woman . Beacon Press, Boston 2005, p. 378, FN 18.
  31. ^ Amos Bronson Alcott, Karen Ann English: Notes of conversations, 1848-1875 . Fairleigh Dickinson university press, Madison 2007, p. 242.