Troll Garden, The.
Cather, Willa Sibert. The Troll Garden. New York: McClure, Phillips & Co., 1905.
8vo.; red cloth; covers faintly used; two tiny soil marks on rear covers.
First edition, first issue of Cather’s first volume of fiction: Crane A4a. Preceded only by the privately published April Twilights (1903), a book of poetry which Cather regretted–she later bought up all the remainder copies and had them destroyed.
A presentation copy, inscribed to Cather’s literary mentor Annie Fields: To Mrs. Fields from Willa Sibert Cather, New York, May 16, 1910.
James Fields–owner of Ticknor & Fields and editor for a decade of the Atlantic Monthly–was a major force in nineteenth century American publishing. After Fields died, his widow Annie followed in his footsteps: together with Sarah Orne Jewett, her intimate companion, she ran the preeminent literary salon of the era at her home, 148 Charles Street in Boston. Her circle of friends constituted a veritable who’s who of turn-of-the-century female authors: Celia Thaxter, Louise Imogen Guiney, Alice French, Rose Terry Cooke, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Harriet Prescott Spofford; in 1908, it expanded to include the aspiring fiction writer Willa Cather.
When Cather, then a journalist, visited Boston to write about Mary Baker Eddy, she was introduced to Mrs. Fields through a mutual friend–Mrs. Louis Brandeis, wife of the future Supreme Court Justice. In the 74 year old Mrs. Fields Cather found a maternal figure who provided emotional and financial support for her work. In addition to introducing her to prominent literary and social figures, Fields offered Cather a safe haven on Charles Street in which to explore her own identity as a young woman and as a writer. “Sometimes entering a new door can make a great change in one’s life,” Cather would write reverently in 148 Charles Street, her expository tribute to Mrs. Fields. Many years later, she would vividly recall walking through that door to her first encounter with Fields and Jewett in their salon:
... That room ran the depth of the house, its back windows looking down on a deep garden. Directly above the garden wall lay the Charles River, and, beyond, the Cambridge shore. At five o’clock in the afternoon the river was silvery from a half-hidden sun; over the great open space of water the western sky was dove-coloured with little ripples of rose. The air was full of soft moisture and the hint of approaching spring. Against this screen of pale winter light were the two ladies: Mrs. Fields reclining on a green sofa, directly under the youthful portrait of Charles Dickens (now in the Boston Art Museum), Miss Jewett seated, the low tea-table between them... I do not at all remember what we talked about...I was too intent upon the ladies... (Cather, 148 Charles Street, quoted in, Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice, by Sharon O’Brien, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 316)
Cather, who hailed from a middle-American, middle-class home, was desperate for the literary and cultural heritage that an affiliation with Mrs. Fields bestowed upon her. Through Mrs. Fields, Cather learned about John Donne’s work and heard tales of Henry James as a young man. Mrs. Fields provided Cather with the kind of education that far exceeded her formal one. “It was not only men of letters, Dickens, Thackery, and Matthew Arnold, who met Mrs. Fields’s friends [at Fields’s salon],” Cather reported,
Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, Hawthorne, Lowell, Sumner, Norton, Oliver Wendell Holmes–the list sounds like something in a school-book, but in Mrs. Fields’s house one came to believe they had been very living people–to feel that they had not been long absent from the rooms so full of their thoughts...
While Mrs. Fields took responsibility for Cather’s intellectual tutelage, her partner Sarah Orne Jewett took charge of Cather’s literary development, carefully reading and critiquing her unpublished fiction. It is no exaggeration to claim that Fields and Je
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