Annie Adams Fields

Annie Adams Fields (1834 - 1915), United States writer was born in Boston, Massachusetts.

She was the second wife of the publisher and author James Thomas Fields, whom she married in 1854, and with whom she encouraged up and coming writers such as Sarah Orne Jewett , Mary Freeman , and Emma Lazarus . She was equally at home with great and established figures including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Harriet Beecher Stowe , whose biography she fearlessly compiled.

Fields' work includes:

• Under the Olive (1880), a book of verses
• James T Fields: Biographical Notes and Personal Sketches (1882)
• Authors and Friends (1896)
• The Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1897)
• The Return of Persephone and Orpheus (1900).

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 and companion was Sarah Orne Jewett, a novelist and story writer whom her husband had published in The Atlantic. Fields and Jewett were together for the rest of Jewett's life (Jewett died in 1907). The two were friends with many of the main literary figures of their time, including Willa Cather, Mary Ellen Chase, William Dean Howells, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Alfred Tennyson, , Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mark Twain, Sarah Wyman Whitman , Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and John Greenleaf Whittier .

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 nineteenth century poetry, it is for her short sympathetic biographies that she should now be especially remembered.

Along with the sympathy that Fields brings to her portraits, one will find the clear-eyed judgements that great criticism requires. As Samuel Johnson 's "observation with extensive view" had surveyed the eighteenth century scene, Annie Fields' sharp decisive portraits etch the nineteenth century American literary scene for us today. In a twenty-first century riddled by kiss-and-tell and self-serving memoirs, it is refreshing to return to the work of Annie Fields whose sympathetic heart governed her critical eye.

Every paragraph of Fields' work begins with friendship and enlarges the view to understand the life and the work of its subject. Whether she is writing about the endurance of Longfellow , the homespun humor of John Greenleaf Whittier , or the conversations of Lady Tennyson , Fields never exploits her privileged view. Today we can continue to experience the literary life of her times through her sympathetic and critical eye.

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