Though she has virtually disappeared from history of American journalism, Kate Field (1838-1896) was a forerunner of such famous turn-of-the-century women reporters as Nellie Bly Dorothy Dix. According to her obituary in New York Tribune, she was one of best-known women in at height of her career Field Dead). A member of expatriate community in Florence in late 1850s, she befriended Brownings, Trollopes, Walter Savage Landor while still in her early twenties. One of first women to contribute to Atlantic Monthly,(1) a prolific travel writer theatre reviewer for New York Tribune, she was also, I believe, model for character of Henrietta Stackpole in Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady. (2) She first won fame for her dispatches about Charles Dickens's final visit to United States, or, as Clemens later reminisced, she made a wide, spasmodic notoriety in 1867 by some letters which she sent from Boston--by telegraph--to Trib une about Dickens's readings there in beginning of his triumphant American tour. At time the idea of telegraphing a newspaper letter was new astonishing, he explained, and wonder of it was in every one's mouth. Kate Field became a celebrity at (Twain, Mark Twain's Autobiography 1:157). She soon revised these dispatches into a book, Pen Photographs of Charles Dickens's Readings (1868), that passed through two editions that remains an extremely valuable reference resource about style manner of Dickens's stage performances. She later published two popular travel books, Hap-Hazard (1873) Ten Days in Spain (1875). Many of her pieces collected in former volume are written in a breezy style reminiscent of Clemens's The Innocents Abroad (1869). For example, she opened a travel letter from Ems, Germany, originally contributed to Paris American Register in June 1872, as follows: I am requested to say something about Americans abroad. Well, I am sorry to make confession, but either there are a great many fools in America, or all fools in America visit Europe. I have not yet arrived at a definite conclusion on subject, for truth is said to lie in a well, a great deal of rope is required to get at it; but judging from fact that I never met such peculiar specimens at home as I meet or hear of abroad, I am inclined to believe that a large proportions of our idiots seek an asylum on this side of Atlantic. Perhaps this is retort courteous we make to Europe for sending us her adventurers, thieves, burglars. (172) In late 1870s, moreover, Field worked as a publicist for Alexander Graham Bell, once even singing Irish folk songs over telephone to Queen Victoria, she was instrumental in founding of Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford John Brown Memorial in Adirondacks. Between 1890 1895 she edited published her own weekly paper, Kate Field's Washington, to which Charlotte Perkins Gilman contributed thirty of her earliest essays, stories, poems (Scharnhorst 5, 6, 8, passim). Nevertheless, Field struggled for a livelihood throughout her career. Two years after she covered Dickens's tour for Tribune, she turned to more lucrative lecture platform. In effect, she began to trade on her celebrity. As she asked Whitelaw Reid, managing editor of Tribune, in June 1869, Do you expect Hood, Charles Lamb George Alfred Townsend [to write] for $15 per column? (Letter to Whitlaw Reid). She explained to actor Noah Miller Ludlow next month, I've gone into because it pays better than anything else, I am tired of grubbing along.... There is no more reason why a woman should not lecture than that she should not sing or act. At least I shall try to make lecturing fashionable as well as profitable (Kate Field: Selected Letters 48). She debuted in Boston, Brooklyn, New York in spring of 1869 with a defense of Woman in Lyceum before audiences that included Edwin P. …