Hitty, Her First Hundred Years

Carved from a piece of mountain ash by a traveling peddler in Maine sometime in the 1820s, Hitty is a small wooden doll made for a girl named Phoebe Preble, and she narrates the next hundred years of her own life as she passes from owner to owner across a changing country. Her adventures include a whaling voyage that strands her overboard for a time, a spell hidden inside the stuffing of a parlor sofa, an abandonment in a hayloft that leaves her waiting years for anyone to find her again, a trip to India, and a brush with fame when the writer Charles Dickens himself briefly holds her during one of her stops. Field moves Hitty through roughly a century of American social change, from sailing ships and rural New England parlors to the modern city, letting the doll's fixed, watchful perspective show how much changes around her while she herself stays essentially the same small carved object throughout. The novel closes with Hitty purchased at auction and installed in a New York antique shop, finally settled among other old dolls and writing down the memoir a reader has apparently been following all along.

Field based Hitty directly on a real antique doll she owned, now kept at the Stockbridge Library Association in Massachusetts, and that real object gives the invented voice an unusual groundedness; a reader senses an actual doll's history sitting underneath the fiction. The book moves briskly from episode to episode rather than building toward one sustained plot, closer to a picaresque travelogue than a conventional novel, illustrated throughout by Dorothy Lathrop's detailed, old fashioned drawings that match the doll's own nineteenth century origins.