Skip to main content

The Field House by Robin Clifford Wood: book review


The Field House: A Writer’s Life Lost and Found on an Island in Maine (2021) is set on Sutton Island, America, in the 1920s and 1930s. It is a loose biography of award-winning author Rachel Field (1894-1942).


In 1994, the author, Robin Clifford Wood, bought a house on an island off the coast of Maine. It was the previous home to children’s author, poet, and playwright Rachel Field in the 1920s-1930s. Rachel Field died suddenly at the age of forty-seven at the pinnacle of her career. Why had no one ever written about her and her achievements? After living in Rachel Field’s house for 26 years, Robin Wood sets about writing of Rachel’s life in the neglected house – using information and inspiration from the items left in the boxes in the attic. 


Rachel Field lived in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, to the age of eleven in 1905; a place of ‘simplicity and beauty’ with a healthy relationship to ‘fairies, elves, and other magical beings.’ Then the move to Springfield provided her with better education in a larger community – where she was recognized for her poetry in 1914. From the age of fifteen, she had been spending summer holidays on Sutton Island where it inspired her creativity in writing and drawing. In 1922, at the age of twenty-seven, she bought the house on Sutton Island, which she called the Playhouse.


The house, built on a craggy cliff in 1898, is the home of her island life: ‘I am truly most myself here – the self I was intended to be.’ Off the wild coast of Maine was Rachel’s heaven on Earth. 


One rejection letter in 1927 led her on the road to success when the publisher suggested that she ‘ought, perhaps, to pursue the genre of children’s literature.’ She followed that advice, except for her first controverial novel Time out of Mind (1935) in which the heroine defied social bounderies and included ‘the mixing of such divergent social castes.’ But it became a national bestseller and a Hollywood movie starring Phyllis Calvert and Robert Hutton in 1947. It also provided the financial security for Rachel Field to marry Arthur Pederson in 1935.


This was not her only Hollywood movie – her book All This and Heaven Too (1938) was made into a movie starring Bette Davis and Charles Boyer in 1940.


Robin Clifford Wood brings Rachel Field to life through her stories and poems, as well as unearthed letters and photographs. And readers learn of Rachel’s suffering and death in 1942. This book is about beauty, creativity, routines, spirit, love, and heartbreak. 





Rachel Field







As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

 

 

MARTINA NICOLLS

MartinaNicollsWebsite

 

Martinasblogs

Publications

Facebook

Paris Website

Animal Website

Flower Website

SUBSCRIBE TO MARTINA NICOLLS FOR NEWS AND UPDATES 


MARTINA NICOLLS  is an international aid and development consultant, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pir-E-Kamil - The Perfect Mentor by Umera Ahmed: book review

The Perfect Mentor pbuh  (2011) is set in Lahore and Islamabad in Pakistan. The novel commences with Imama Mubeen in medical university. She wants to be an eye specialist. Her parents have arranged for her to marry her first cousin Asjad. Salar Sikander, her neighbour, is 18 years old with an IQ of 150+ and a photographic memory. He has long hair tied in a ponytail. He imbibes alcohol, treats women disrespectfully and is generally a “weird chap” and a rude, belligerent teenager. In the past three years he has tried to commit suicide three times. He tries again. Imama and her brother, Waseem, answer the servant’s call to help Salar. They stop the bleeding from his wrist and save his life. Imama and Asjad have been engaged for three years, because she wants to finish her studies first. Imama is really delaying her marriage to Asjad because she loves Jalal Ansar. She proposes to him and he says yes. But he knows his parents won’t agree, nor will Imama’s parents. That
1 comment
Read more

Flaws in the Glass, a self-portrait by Patrick White: book review

The manuscript, Flaws in the Glass (1981), is Patrick Victor Martindale White’s autobiography. White, born in 1912 in England, migrated to Sydney, Australia, when he was six months old. For three years, at the age of 20, he studied French and German literature at King’s College at the University of Cambridge in England. Throughout his life, he published 12 novels. In 1957 he won the inaugural Miles Franklin Literary Award for Voss, published in 1956. In 1961, Riders in the Chariot became a best-seller, winning the Miles Franklin Literary Award. In 1973, he was the first Australian author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for The Eye of the Storm, despite many critics describing his works as ‘un-Australian’ and himself as ‘Australia’s most unreadable novelist.’ In 1979, The Twyborn Affair was short-listed for the Booker Prize, but he withdrew it from the competition to give younger writers the opportunity to win the award. His autobiography, Flaws in the Glass
Post a Comment
Read more

The Beggars' Strike by Aminata Sow Fall: book review

The Beggar’sStrike (1979 in French and 1981 in English) is set in an unstated country in West Africa in a city known only as The Capital. Undoubtedly, Senegalese author Sow Fall writes of her own experiences. It was also encapsulated in the 2000 film, Battu , directed by Cheick Oumar Sissoko from Mali. Mour Ndiaye is the Director of the Department of Public Health and Hygiene, with the opportunity of a distinguished and coveted promotion to Vice-President of the Republic. Tourism has declined and the government blames the local beggars in The Capital. Ndiaye must rid the streets of beggars, according to a decree from the Minister. Ndiaye instructs his department to carry out weekly raids. One of the raids leads to the death of lame beggar, Madiabel, who ran into an oncoming vehicle as he tried to escape, leaving two wives and eight children. Soon after, another raid resulted in the death of the old well-loved, comic beggar Papa Gorgui Diop. Enough is enou
8 comments
Read more