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Battle of the Books mary abigail dodge, who wrote under the pen name Gail Hamilton, thought herself lucky in her publisher. Ticknor and Fields was the country’s premier press, and the Atlantic, which carried more than two dozen of her essays, its bestmonthly.ToJamesT.Fields,Hamilton,with “a thought, an opinion, an epigram for everything ,” appeared an obvious successor to Oliver Wendell Holmes.1 Yet someone who was intimidated , to quote one of Hamilton’s admirers, by neither “the spectacle of the judge, nor the surplice of the priest” made him wary.2 For once he and his wife disagreed, with Annie delighting in Hamilton’s iconoclastic high jinks. When Annie had visited Hamilton at her country home, she saw her rescue two chicks in a sudden storm. Yellow hair whipping about her face, the chicks nestling in fists against her chest, and the wind pinning her in place, Hamilton threw back her head and laughed. Annie knew on the spot that they would be friends. Asked to describe herself for a book on eminent women of the day, Hamilton poached a few lines from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Bells.” “I am,” she wrote: Neither man nor woman I am neither brute nor human, I am a ghoul! Hamilton thought herself marred after a childhood accident left her blind in one eye. She half-seriously told a friend: “Thee says thee 9 We found Gail Hamilton a most comfortable and desirous guest to have in the house. . . . I had no idea there was such a sensible woman of letters in the world. She is just as healthy-minded as if she had never touched a pen. nathaniel hawthorne to James T. Fields, 1 July 1862 r e p u b l i c o f w o r d s [ 70 ] cannot look in Annie Fields’ face and blame her for anything, but thee makes up for it the moment thee looks in my face.”3 Contemporaries attributed Hamilton’s “ghoulishness” solely to her tongue. “Was she suckled, like Romulus and Remus, by a she-wolf in her infancy?” her biographer asks. “Were vipers her cherished toys in childhood?”4 Fields and even Annie would have to answer with a resounding yes. Hamilton took her pen name from her hometown of Hamilton, Massachusetts , where she grew up on a farm and attended school in Ipswich. She began writing poetry and sketches when teaching and edited Wood’s Magazine. A cousin of Senator Blaine’s wife, she passed several seasons in Washington, D.C., writing editorials and leading a Bible class, open to people of all faiths. According to friends, Hamilton’s one foible, apart from excessive frankness, was a love of fancy dress. Hamilton may have been more honest. “The trouble with me,” she said, “is that I like” every living thing, even flies. “I think a fly is real good company. . . . How do you suppose life presents itself to a fly? When they get too numerous for comfort , we just buy a little poison paper, and death comes to them with no dread or fright, only as a fragrant and luring feast—a sweet intoxication. Oh, I wouldn’t give up the flies for anything!”5 When the Fieldses’ friendship with Hamilton ended abruptly in February 1868, they felt rather like the flies she describes. The quarrel—or “battle,” as it came to be known—began with an article in the Congregationalist called “Pay of Authors,” which stated that the average author received a full 10 percent return on a book’s retail price. After mulling the figure over, Hamilton wrote Fields asking for an explanation of her royalties. The facts, as she understood them, were these: after the first run, Fields had paid her a 10 percent royalty (amounting to two thousand dollars) on all volumes of the collection Country Living and Country Thinking. For her next three books, because of the war and uncertainties in the trade, she had agreed to accept fifteen cents per copy. At the time, fifteen cents equaled the 10 percent royalty, but as the price of her books rose, the percentage of her overall royalty had dropped. When the market improved, neither she nor Fields renegotiated their oral agreement, and the house continued to pay her at the lower rate. Fields made the mistake of ignoring Hamilton’s query about royalties for weeks. He dismissed its threat that perhaps she should consult a friend who was also a judge...

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