Sidney McCall (Mary McNeil Fenollosa) was one of many novelists concerned with the “Woman Question” who found her way into the Byrdcliffe Library. The most famous of these today is Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a journalist whose short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” is considered a classic depiction of post-partum depression. But McCall was a considerable feminist author in her own right, even if her biography reads closer to Scarlett O’Hara than Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Born into a wealthy Confederate family in 1865, Mary and her mother were forced to flee the family’s plantation when it was burned by Union troops. The family moved to Mobile after the war, and Mary was educated at the city’s Irving Female Institute.With her family in difficult financial circumstances, she married Ludolph Chester at the age of 18, and the couple had a son, Allen Chester. Ludolph died two years into the marriage. Upon hearing of her loss, former suitor Ledyard Scott wrote to her from Tokyo with a proposal of marriage. Mary accepted and sailed for Japan in 1890 with her infant son, marrying Scott shortly after her arrival in Tokyo. The marriage was not a happy one, however, and Mary divorced Scott and returned to Mobile in 1892, now with two children.
In 1895, Mary began working with Ernest Fenollosa, the most prominent scholar of Asian art of the time, in the Asian art division of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Ernest soon divorced his wife to marry Mary, causing such scandal in Boston society that the newly married couple decided to move to New York, and then Japan, where the Fenollosas became the center of a group that included Japanese artists and scholars as well as fellow expatriates such as Lafcadio Hearn. Ernest acted as a purchaser for the Boston museum’s Asian collection, and advised such collectors as Charles Freer, whose collection would eventually become the Freer Gallery of Art of the Smithsonian Institution.
In Japan, Mary began writing poetry and fiction.In 1899, she published her first collection of poems, Out of the Nest: A Flight of Verses, followed by her her first novel, Truth Dexter, in 1901. under the pseudonym Sidney McCall. Given the novel’s suggestive subject matter — a southern wife whose marriage is threatened by a lustful Boston socialite — Fenollosa prudently decided not to use her real name. Truth Dexter was an immediate success, both commercially and critically. Her second and third novels, The Breath of the Gods (1905) and The Dragon Painter (1906), were both set in Japan. In Breath of the Gods, set during the the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, Yuki Onda is called home from her American school by her father. Her father obliges her to marry Prince Hagane to support her country, even though she is in love with Pierre Le Beau. who is an attache at the embassy of Australia in Japan. When Le Beau’s diplomatic masters force him to secure valuable information from Yuki, she takes her own life, leaving a sorrowing Prince and the penitent and loving Le Beau. Both novel and film were a huge success, as were a Broadway play and an opera. The film is now lost, but the poster remains to suggest the lurid romanticism of the plot.
The cover of the book itself is the poster’s complete opposite. But it is equally important, having been designed by one of the most prolific and talented book designers of the period, Amy M. Sacker. Beyond book design Sacker applied her artistic skills to a wide range of other arts, including, illustrations, paintings, jewelry, basketry, leather-working, portraiture, and greeting cards. In 1899, Sacker was elected a master craftsman as a designer, illustrator, and leather worker in the Society of Arts and Crafts of Boston 1897 founded. Despite the active book-binding program at Byrdcliffe at the time, there is no evidence that Sacker ever visited Byrdcliffe. However, given her widespread recognition in the world of arts and crafts illustration, it is easy to assume the book was chosen for the Byrdcliffe library because they knew and appreciated her work.
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