She followed Emerson's advice about ongoing education by studying foreign languages, literature, nature, history, travel books, and biography, and cultivating one's "power of expression."

The fullest congruence of Emerson's advice to his students and Annie Field's activities stems from his repeated insistence that "every good life is necessarily devoted, directly or indirectly, to the service of mankind.

[2] Among her siblings was her brother Zabdiel Boylston Adams Jr. As a girl, she was enrolled at the School for Young Ladies in Boston operated by George Barrell Emerson, where she was encouraged to read, learned Italian, developed an interest in self-expression, and came to appreciate nature.

[3] She married James T. Fields on November 15, 1854, in King's Chapel in Boston with a service conducted by Reverend Ezra Stiles Gannett.

[4] Her husband was a well-established and respected publisher and with him she encouraged up and coming writers such as Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman, and Emma Lazarus.

She was equally at home with great and established figures including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose biography she compiled.

[5] Fields and her husband became close personal friends with many of the authors with whom the publishing house worked, often hosting them at their home for dinner parties and overnight stays.

[9] Though deeply personal passages were edited out after urging from their mutual friend Mark Antony De Wolfe Howe leading some biographers to describe Jewett and Fields's relationship as a friendship, the correspondence depicts their deep love for each other.

Her subjects included her husband, James T. Fields, John Greenleaf Whittier, Celia Thaxter, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, as well as the Jewett letter collection.

She and her husband were friends with many of the main literary figures of their time, including Willa Cather, Mary Ellen Chase, William Dean Howells, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Alfred Tennyson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mark Twain, Sarah Wyman Whitman, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lydia Maria Child, Charles Dudley Warner and John Greenleaf Whittier.

She left for posterity a carefully polished public persona, that of the perfect hostess, the genteel lady, and it is difficult to find the real person underneath.