The Field House

A Writer's Life Lost and Found on an Island in Maine

Robin Clifford Wood

• Publisher: She Writes Press
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781647420468
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Born of illustrious New England stock, Rachel Field was a National Book Award–winning novelist, a Newbery Medal–winning children’s writer, a poet, playwright, and rising Hollywood success in the early twentieth century. Her light was abruptly extinguished at the age of forty-seven, when she died at the pinnacle of her personal happiness and professional acclaim.
Fifty years later, Robin Clifford Wood stepped onto the sagging floorboards of Rachel’s long-neglected home on the rugged shores of an island in Maine and began dredging up Rachel’s history. She was determined to answer the questions that filled the house’s every crevice: Who was this vibrant, talented artist whose very name entrances those who still remember her work? Why is that work—so richly remunerated and widely celebrated in her lifetime—so largely forgotten today? The journey into Rachel’s world took Wood further than she ever dreamed possible, unveiling a life fraught with challenge, and buried by tragedy, and yet incandescent with joy.
The Field House is a book about beauty—beauty in Maine island landscapes, in friendship, love, and heartbreak; beauty hidden beneath a woman’s woefully unbeautiful exterior; beauty in a rare, delightful spirit that still whispers from the past. Just listen.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• 1. The Illustrious Field Family
• 2. Inside-Self and Outside-Self
• 3. Beauty, Loss, and the Emergence of a Poet’s Heart
• 4. If Once You Have Slept on an Island
• 5. Special Student
• 6. Taxis and Toadstools
• 7. The Lonely and Difficult Years
• 8. Spriggin, the Whippet, and the Birth of Hitty
• 9. Mr. Mississippi
• 10. The Newbery Medal
• 11. Love and Pain, Bound Up in Time
• 12. Newlyweds and Nomads
• 13. Not Every Bud May Bear
• 14. All This and Heaven Too
• 15. Hannah
• 16. Hope and Motherhood
• 17. Miracle
• 18. You’ll Never Be Quite the Same
• 19. And Now Tomorrow
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Credits
• About the Author