Poems.
Rose Hawthorne’s Copy
Lazarus, Emma. The Poems of Emma Lazarus. In two volumes. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1889.
2 vols., 8vo.; white spotting to upper left quadrant of cover of, and dampstaining to top edge of preliminaries of volume two; green cloth, spines stamped in gilt; t.e.g. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
Together with:
Hawthorne, Rose. Autograph note, written on one side of a plain leaf, folded to hold a handful of clippings: “Articles written about Emma Lazarus by her Literary friends, after her death.
First edition of this posthumous collection, published two years after her premature death from cancer in 1887 at the age of 38. A wonderful association copy, from the library of Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Lazarus’s friend who went on to found the Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer and the Dominican Congregation of St. Rose of Lima. With a handful of memorial clippings about Lazarus, labeled and retained by Hawthorne. The frontispiece of volume one is a portrait engraving of the author; in volume two, Hawthorne has affixed a cabinet card portrait of Lazarus in lieu of a frontispiece.
Rose Hawthorne Lathrop (1851-1926), the second of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne’s three children and wife of the Boston editor George Lathrop, avoided the legacy of a mediocre literary career, secured through pedigree, when she began to consider a life of service to indigent cancer victims in 1896. In the early ’80s she and Lathrop had moved to New York to escape the memories of the death of their four-year-old son, intimately associated with their life in Concord. Rose immersed herself in writing, and devoted her time to literary friends and travels. In the spring of 1883 she had planned a European trip with Lazarus, though the sojourn was, inevitably, canceled. Hawthorne’s biographer Patricia Dunlavy Valenti writes,
Lazarus, Jeannette Gilder, Emma Holland, Lillian Aldrich, and Rose were all friends and socialized at the salon the Gilders held in their home in New York City.… Now Rose’s association with these people, who were so intimately connected with the writing and the publication of the foremost authors of the time, was important to her literary aspirations, even if she did hold them in varying degrees of awe. Rose wrote of her friendship with Emma Lazarus: “[She] and I sometimes walked and talked together (after meeting in the Gilders’ salon). And she had such sweet delicacy of spirit that she never gave the least sign that she did not find a very secure footing for her mental exploration while accompanying a person who knew little Latin and less Greek. On the contrary, she assured me that I was a paragon for ‘stirring her up with suggestions!’” (To Myself a Stranger, Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1991, pp. 69-70)
Lazarus’s death profoundly affected Hawthorne, who at the time was trying to mend the tears in her marriage: In 1891 she and Lathrop jointly converted to Catholicism, but their shared religion and even shared writing projects—in 1894 they published a history of the Visitation order in Washington, D.C.—cured neither the ills that infected their life together nor Lathrop’s alcoholism. They separated the following year; three years later Lathrop died.
In the late 1890s Hawthorne fell more and more under the influence of her experiences with and readings on religious orders, especially on her patron saint, St. Rose of Lima, who “had ministered to the cancerous poor as a member of the Dominican third order.” She witnessed first hand the cruelty of Blackwell’s Island, a colony for indigent cancer victims believed to be contagious, and recalled Lazarus’s own death, made only slightly less terrible by her material comforts. After completing a three month nursing program, Hawthorne,
thus prepared, established herself … in the slums of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Her purpose was to make the last days of the hopelessly ill as c
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