FIELD, Isobel ("Belle" Osbourne Strong).
This Life I've Loved.
LATER PRINTING. New York & Toronto: Longmans, Green & Co., 1948.
8vo. 353 pp. Photo-illustrated plates; the frontispiece reproduces a portrait of Field by Albert Herter. Orange cloth, issued without dust jacket; near fine with darkening to the spine. Inscribed and signed by the author on the title page to the actress Judith Anderson: "To Judith Anderson, as kind and generous as she is great and glorious. Isobel Field."
A remarkable association copy uniting Robert Louis Stevenson's stepdaughter with one of the great tragic actresses of the American stage. Judith Anderson (1897–1992), the Adelaide-born actress who built her career on the American stage, received this copy at the height of her fame. Anderson was a friend of Jeffers and a frequent guest at Tor House in Carmel, and she made Santa Barbara her American home.
The inscription joins two women whose lives ran, decades apart, through the same California literary world. Isobel Field — born Belle Osbourne in Indianapolis in 1858 — was present at nearly every chapter of the Stevenson story: the meeting with her mother Fanny at Grez in 1876, the San Francisco marriage in 1880, the Silverado summer, the Hawaiian years at the court of King Kalākaua (for whom she designed royal insignia, including the royal seals and the star of the Royal Order of Oceania), and Samoa, where she remained until Stevenson's death at Vailima in 1894. She returned to California and lived there until her death, at ninety-four, in Santa Barbara in 1953. This Life I've Loved, first published in 1937, is among the most vivid first-person accounts of the Stevenson household and of the late nineteenth-century Pacific world.
This copy is further distinguished by Field's own hand throughout: she has tipped in six photographs — herself; her son, the playwright Austin Strong; Robert Louis Stevenson's mother; Fanny Stevenson with a Samoan girl; the Stevenson tomb on Mount Vaea, above Vailima; and what appear to be Samoan artifacts — most captioned in her manuscript. At the rear she has tipped in a color print of her Santa Barbara cottage at El Mirasol, captioned in her hand.
SKU TO-2026-075
