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

Harris, Susan K. 2002. The Cultural Work of the Late Nineteenth-Century Hostess: Annie Adams Fields and Mary Gladstone Drew. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. $49.95 hc. viii + 192 pp.

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 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."

Given Harris's previous work on women who support and facilitate the careers of male public figures, it seems there is no better scholar to approach the topic of late nineteenth-century hostesses. Unlike in The Courtship of Olivia Langdon and Mark Twain (Cambridge University Press, 1996), however, here Harris is dealing with British as well as American women and their respective cultures. She began the study, in fact, with an interest in Mary Gladstone, whose role as hostess and private secretary for her father facilitated William Gladstone's four terms as Great Britain's Prime Minister. Harris acknowledges that her comparison of Fields and Gladstone can be seen as problematic, given that there are "radical differences in the two countries' political, social, demographic, and institutional evolutions" (2002, 23). Yet she argues that these differences cannot be seen as deterrents to comparative studies. "In an investigation such as this one," she writes, "where roles are performed similarly, with similar results, it makes more sense to compare than to contrast" (24). This is not to say that Harris pays no attention to the differences between the two women; these differences in national identity, writing style, and attitude toward the position of hostess (to name just a few) are an important part of the study. The similarities, however, are intriguing. Both women performed the role of hostess within an upper-class, privileged family, facilitating the careers of powerful men--James T. Fields, one of nineteenth-century America's most important publishers, and William Gladstone. Prime Minister of Great Britain. Hostessing required both women to develop specialized skills that enabled them to construct and manage more than one domestic environment conducive to the sharing of opinions and the working of influence--both their own and that of friends. As Harris writes, the hostess placed "other people in contact with each other and so directed the conversation that her guests found themselves talking about subjects of immediate relevance to their own work and, beyond their immediate concerns, to their societies. In this, her power lay not in her directions to any particular ...