English Traits.
to Sarah Orne Jewett From Annie Fields
(Jewett, Sarah Orne, her copy) Emerson, Ralph Waldo. English Traits. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1882.
16mo.; yellow cloth; stamped in black; minor edgewear and soiling; bookplate reading “From the Library of Old Fields/Burton W.F. Trafton, Jr.” to the front pastedown.
First English edition, third printing. A stirring association copy of Emerson’s survey of the national characteristics, manners and cultural achievements of the English people, given by Annie Fields to her lifelong companion Sarah Orne Jewett, and inscribed on the title page, Sarah O. Jewett/ from her Annie Fields/Isle of Wight/Sunday, June 25, 1882 (the year of this edition’s publication); with two pencil markings (p.17-18), likely by Fields: the first highlights two paragraphs on traveling at sea; the second follows a paragraph on being able to see churches, towns, etc, but not “the curse of 600 years,” after which is written, “1882!”
When Fields gifted this book to Jewett, the women were new friends: Fields’s husband, former publisher and Atlantic editor James Fields, had died the year before, and the women met shortly thereafter. In June 1882, the date of the inscription, the pair was on a trip together in Europe; it was Fields’s first time abroad (Gollin, Rita K. Annie Adams Fields: Woman of Letters. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002, p.147.)
Fields had a close association with Emerson. A student of his cousin, George Emerson, at the School for Young Ladies in Boston, Fields exchanged casual correspondence with Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom she had seen speak on multiple occasions while she was a student, and who was a social acquaintance of her late husband. Fields cited both Emerson men as direct influences on her dedication to self-education, particularly in matters of “nature, foreign languages, literature, history, travel books, and biography” (Gollin 17).
The Fields and Jewetts relationship would quickly deepen in its intensity, with Jewett coming to split her life between her home in South Berwick, Maine, and Fields’s homes in Boston and Manchester; the pair would eventually move in together, and would remain in their “Boston Marriage” until Jewett’s death in 1909.
Provenance: Book acquired from the library of Jewett’s nephew, Theodore [Teddy], whom Sarah and her sister Mary raised after his mother’s untimely death. After Theodore’s death, some of his library was bequeathed to Harvard University, while another part remained in the Jewett homestead. This copy, part of the latter group, was eventually found by collector Burton Trafton, whose bookplate is on the front pastedown.
OCLC locates four copies of this printing, all located in the United Kingdom: The University of Edinburgh, Cambridge University, and The British Library (two copies).
(#13541)
Print Inquire
