Annie Adams Fields, best known as the consummate literary hostess, wife to publisher and editor James T. Fields, and, in later years, companion to Sarah Orne Jewett, regionalist author of The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), has remained something of an enigma to literary critics until recently. Commonly regarded as the center around which other, more luminous literary lights shone, she must also be considered from other perspectives: that of poet, diarist, editorial voice, social worker, and author of literary memoirs.

She was born Ann West Adams on 6 June 1834, the daughter of prominent Boston physician Zabdiel Boylston Adams and Sarah May Holland Adams. Related through her father to two presidents, John Adams and John Quincey Adams, and through her mother to Louisa May Alcott, Fields was second youngest of the couple's seven children, two of whom died in infancy. Annie Adams was particularly close to her two older...