Though she is virtually unknown today, Kate Field (1838-1896) was “one of the best-known women in America” during her lifetime, according to her obituary in the New York Tribune. A member of the expatriate community in Florence in the late 1850s, she befriended the Brownings, the Trollopes, Walter Savage Landor, and the painter Elihu Vedder while she was still in short dresses. One of the first women to contribute to the Atlantic Monthly, she was also a popular lecturer and prolific travel writer for a number of papers during the 1860s and 1870s. Between 1890 and 1895, she published a weekly newspaper, Kate Field’s Washington. In all, she published an estimated three thousand newspaper and magazine articles during her career. She was, in her heyday, the most prominent American woman journalist of the period, an unorthodox feminist, and the model for the character of Henrietta Stackpole in Henry James’s novel The Portrait of a Lady. More to the point, she was also a familiar figure in Newport over a period of nearly forty years.
Until the age of thirty-five, Field was often a summer resident of the town. In the winter of 1855, at the age of only sixteen, she left her home in St. Louis to enter Lasell Seminary in Auburndale, Mass., to finish her education. Though she boarded at the school, for the next three years she also spent holidays and summers in Newport with her aunt and uncle, Cordelia Riddle Sanford and Milton H. Sanford. With the exception of 1871, Field spent at least part of every summer between 1863 and 1873 there. She freely socialized with the habitués, and she was welcome in their homes. For example, she invited Vedder to visit her in Newport in the fall of 1863 and introduced him to some of the people who would soon become his patrons. She also met both Henry James and William D. Howells in Newport in the summer of 1868.
In 1869-70, the architect William Ralph Emerson built a summerhouse for Milton H. Sanford on the Point. Located at 72 Washington Street and now a popular bed-and-breakfast called the Sanford-Covell Villa Marina, this large wooden house in the popular Modern Gothic or “Stick Style” of the era became a periodic focus of Kate’s visits to Newport. Nicknamed Edna Villa after Milton’s mother, this was a showcase, one of the most expensive and luxurious homes in Newport at the time.
After the death of her uncle Milton in 1883 and that of her aunt Cordelia in 1894, Kate found herself virtually cut out of the will by the manipulations of an aunt and two nieces. She contested the will in the case of “Kate Field et al. vs. Probate Court of Newport” that was tried in Newport between April 28-May 4, 1895. The trial ended in a hung jury and Field, embittered, gave up on the cause, leaving Newport behind.
Gary Scharnhorst
Journal of Newport History
Volume 72, Number 248, Spring 2003
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