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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







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MARTINA NICOLLS

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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).


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