Annie Adams Fields was a United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 writer.

1834 -1881

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she was the second wife of the publisher and author James Thomas Fields

James Thomas Fields

James Thomas Fields was an American publisher, editor, and poet.-Early life and family:He was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on December 31, 1817 and named James Field; the family later added the "s". His father was a sea captain and died before Fields was three...

, whom she married in 1854, and with whom she encouraged up and coming writers such as Sarah Orne Jewett

Sarah Orne Jewett

Sarah Orne Jewett was an American novelist and short story writer, best known for her local color works set in or near South Berwick, Maine, on the border of New Hampshire, which in her day was a declining New England seaport.-Biography:Jewett's family had been residents of New England for many...

, Mary Freeman, and Emma Lazarus

Emma Lazarus

Lazarus began to be more interested in her Jewish ancestry after reading the George Eliot novel, Daniel Deronda, and as she heard of the Russian pogroms in the early 1880s. This led Lazarus to write articles on the subject. She also began translating the works of Jewish poets into English...

. She was equally at home with great and established figures including Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century...

 and Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe was an American abolitionist and author. Her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was a depiction of life for African-Americans under slavery; it reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the United States and United Kingdom...

, whose biography she fearlessly compiled. She was a philanthropist and social reformer; in particular, she founded the Holly Tree Inn

Holly Tree Inn

The Holly Tree Inns were a system of cheap eating establishments in the northeastern United States in the 1870s. They were founded by Annie Adams Fields, wife of Boston publisher James Thomas Fields. The first of them was founded in December, 1870.-Overview:...

s, coffeehouses serving inexpensive and nutritious meals, and the Lincoln Street Home, a safe and inexpensive residence for unmarried working women.

1881 - 1915

After Fields' husband died in 1881, she continued to occupy the center of Boston literary life. The hallmark of Fields' work is a sympathetic understanding of her friends, who happened to be the leading literary figures of her time.

Her closest friend was Sarah Orne Jewett, a novelist and story writer whom her husband had published in The Atlantic. Fields and Jewett lived together for the rest of Jewett's life (Jewett died in 1909).

The two were friends with many of the main literary figures of their time, including Willa Cather

Willa Cather

Willa Seibert Cather was an American author who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, in works such as O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and The Song of the Lark. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours , a novel set during World War I...

, Mary Ellen Chase

Mary Ellen Chase

Mary Ellen Chase was an American educator, teacher, scholar, and author. She is regarded as one of the most important regional literary figures of the early twentieth century....

, William Dean Howells

William Dean Howells

William Dean Howells was an American realist author and literary critic. Nicknamed "The Dean of American Letters", he was particularly known for his tenure as editor of the Atlantic Monthly as well as his own writings, including the Christmas story "Christmas Every Day" and the novel The Rise of...

, Henry James

Henry James

Henry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....

, Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. Kipling received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature...

, Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe was an American abolitionist and author. Her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was a depiction of life for African-Americans under slavery; it reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the United States and United Kingdom...

, Alfred Tennyson, Oliver Wendell Holmes

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. was an American physician, professor, lecturer, and author. Regarded by his peers as one of the best writers of the 19th century, he is considered a member of the Fireside Poets. His most famous prose works are the "Breakfast-Table" series, which began with The Autocrat...

, Mark Twain

Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist...

, Sarah Wyman Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an American poet and educator whose works include "Paul Revere's Ride", The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline...

, Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer.Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804 in the city of Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hathorne and the former Elizabeth Clarke Manning. His ancestors include John Hathorne, a judge during the Salem Witch Trials...

, Lydia Maria Child, Charles Dudley Warner

Charles Dudley Warner

Charles Dudley Warner was an American essayist, novelist, and friend of Mark Twain, with whom he co-authored the novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.-Biography:...

 and John Greenleaf Whittier

John Greenleaf Whittier

John Greenleaf Whittier was an influential American Quaker poet and ardent advocate of the abolition of slavery in the United States. He is usually listed as one of the Fireside Poets...

.

Fields was a forward-looking, philanthropic and multi-talented woman, who encouraged the talents of others even as she followed the good of the intellect. Although Fields often turns up in the pantheons of 19th century poetry, it is for her short sympathetic biographies that she is now remembered.

Along with the sympathy that Fields brings to her portraits, one will find the clear-eyed judgments that great criticism requires. As Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson

Samuel Johnson , often referred to as Dr. Johnson, was an English author who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer...

's "observation with extensive view" had surveyed the eighteenth century scene, Annie Fields' sharp decisive portraits etch the nineteenth century American literary scene.

Literary importance

Fields' literary importance lies primarily in two areas: one is the influence she exerted over her husband in the selection of works to be published by Ticknor and Fields

Ticknor and Fields

Ticknor and Fields was an American publishing company based in Boston, Massachusetts.-Early years:In 1832 William Davis Ticknor and John Allen began a small publishing business which operated out of the Old Corner Bookstore located on Washington and School Streets in Boston, Massachusetts...

, the major publishing house of the time. He valued her judgement as reflecting a woman's point of view.

Second, Fields edited important collections of letters and biographical sketches. Her subjects included her husband, James T. Fields, John Greenleaf Whittier, Celia Thaxter

Celia Thaxter

Celia Laighton Thaxter was an American writer of poetry and stories. She was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.-Life and work:...

, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, as well as the Jewett letter collection. While these are not critical, scholarly works (the Jewett collection, especially, is heavily edited), they do provide primary material for the researcher. Her Authors and Friends (1896) is a series of sketches, the best of which are of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Celia Thaxter. Fields' diaries remain unpublished, except for excerpts published by Mark DeWolfe Howe in 1922.

Fields remains a somewhat puzzling figure. Her writings reflect a traditional orientation toward sentimentalism and the cult of true womanhood. However, she was a supporter of "women's emancipation," and her association with Jewett and others suggests a less traditional side. She left for posterity a carefully polished public persona, that of the perfect hostess, the genteel lady, and it is difficult to find the real person underneath.

Writings

• Ode (1863).
• Asphodel (1866).
• The Children of Lebanon (1872).
• James T. Fields, Biographical Notes and Personal Sketches (1881).
• Under the Olive (1881).
• Whittier, Notes of His Life and of His Friendship (1883).
• Fields became heavily involved in Boston charity work and wrote a social-welfare manual, How to Help the Poor (1883).
• A Week Away from Time (written anonymously, with others, 1887).
• A Shelf of Old Books (1894).
• The Letters of Celia Thaxter (edited by Fields with R. Lamb, 1895).
• The Singing Shepherd, and Other 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).
• Fields edited the Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett (ed., 1911).
• Memories of a Hostess (edited by M. D. Howe, 1922).
• The unpublished diaries of Annie Adams Fields are at the Massachusetts Historical Society
  Massachusetts Historical Society
  The Massachusetts Historical Society is a major historical archive specializing in early American, Massachusetts, and New England history...
  
  .

Further reading

• Cather, W., Not Under Forty (1936).
• Davis, A. E., A Recovery of Connectedness in Annie Adams Fields' Authors and Friends and A Shelf of Old Books (thesis,1998).
• Harris, Susan K. The Cultural Work of the Late Nineteenth-Century Hostess: Annie Adams Fields and Mary Gladstone Drew. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
• Howe, H., The Gentle Americans, 1864-1960: Biography of a Breed (1965).
• Howe, A. D., Memories of a Hostess (1922).
• Fields, A., 'Microfilm Edition of the Annie Adams Fields Papers, 1852-1912 (microfilm, 1981). *Matthiessen, F. O., Sarah Orne Jewett (1929).
• Nigro, C. L., Annie Adams Fields: Female Voice in a Male Chorus (thesis,1996).
• Richards, L., Stepping Westward (1931).
• Roman, J., Annie Adams Fields: The Spirit of Charles Street (1990).
• Spofford, H. P., A Little Book of Friends (1916).
• Tryon, W. S., Parnassus Corner: A Life of James T. Fields (1963).
• Winslow, H. M., Literary Boston of Today (1902).

External links