The Cultural Work of the Late Nineteenth-Century Hostess: Annie Adams Fields and Mary Gladstone Drew (review)

Abstract

For decades, feminist scholars have struggled to bring to light the intellectual and artistic achievements of nineteenth-century women in an effort to reveal those women as more than just domestic angels, adoring wives, and perfect mothers. Given the success of this agenda, a study of hostesses might initially seem to be a step backward. After all, Annie Adams Fields and Mary Gladstone Drew, the subjects of Susan K. Harris's new book, devoted their lives to the facilitation of the careers of famous men, Harris admits that this [End Page 199] devotion hindered and often took the place of their own artistic development. Fields, in particular, has been known primarily (and often patronizingly) as a hostess since before her husband's death. Yet The Cultural Work of the Late Nineteenth-Century Hostess is not a revisionary biography of either Fields or Gladstone (Harris refers to her as "Gladstone" rather than "Drew" because she did not marry until 1886, just towards the end of the period addressed by this study) or a lament for what we, as a culture, may have lost by not encouraging the careers of women. Rather, as her title indicates, this is a cultural study of women's influence within an extremely privileged sphere of the politically and intellectually powerful. This is also, just as importantly, a transatlantic study in which Harris rather refreshingly foregrounds her own method and approach to these women's lives and their "cultural work."