Background
Mary Katherine Keemle was born in St. Louis, the daughter of Joseph M. Field, an actor, playwright, and manager, and Eliza (Riddle) Field, a popular actress.
journalist lecturer author actress
Mary Katherine Keemle was born in St. Louis, the daughter of Joseph M. Field, an actor, playwright, and manager, and Eliza (Riddle) Field, a popular actress.
Her early schooldays and childhood were passed in St. Louis, and at the age of sixteen she went to Boston to visit relatives and to study at Lasell Seminary for girls.
Beginning her frequent travels and sojourns abroad in 1859, she went to Europe with her uncle and aunt, living for varying periods in Paris, Rome, and Florence (where she was joined by her mother in 1860), and forming there enduring friendships with the Brownings, the Trollopes, George Eliot, Charlotte Cushman and other distinguished people. In his Autobiography (ch. XVII) Anthony Trollope refers to her as his “most chosen friend, ” whom not to mention “would amount almost to a falsehood. ”
After returning to America, she lived for a time successively in Boston, Newport, and New York, resuming her studies of art, music, and the drama, writing essays for magazines and doing regular correspondence for daily newspapers.
Undaunted by the ill success of her first attempt to become an actress, when on November 14 and 21, 1874 she acted Peg Woffington for only two performances at Booth’s Theatre, New York, she appeared afterwards at intervals for several years in that play, in pieces written by herself, and as leading woman with John T. Raymond in The Gilded Age. Under the name of Mary Keemle she acted in London in Extremes Meet, a comedy of her own writing, and also as Volante in The Honeymoon.
She gained considerable vogue as a correspondent from London and elsewhere of the New York Herald, the New York Tribune, and other newspapers.
Her manner on the lecture platform was easy and vivacious, her newspaper correspondence and books of travel are graphic, her commentary upon actors is entertaining, although not especially authoritative. In everything she did she was vitally in earnest, and she had multitudes of friends who were attached to her even though they had little sympathy with her self-imposed tasks.
During the last five years of her life she edited a paper called Kate Field’s Washington, which she made a pulpit for the preaching of her social, economic, and political faith.
Her religious beliefs were strong, but she was not attached to any sect. She died in Honolulu, whither she had gone on one of her many quixotic jaunts, and as a newspaper correspondent.
Her published books are, Adelaide Ristori (1867) ; Plan- chette’s Diary (1868) ; Mad on Purpose, a Comedy (1868) ; Pen Photographs of Charles Dickens’s Readings (1868); Hap-IIasard (1873), travel and character sketches; Ten Days in Spain (1875); History of Bell’s Telephone (1878); and Charles Albert Fechter (1882), in the American Actor Series.