Sara Bard Field SIGNED/INSCRIBED hdbk The Pale Woman and Other Poems 1927

  

1927 5" x 8" SIGNED/INSCRIBED hardback with dust jacket, book in very good condition (spine is cocked), dust jacket in good condition (foxing, burn marks including hole in back cover) of The Pale Woman and Other Poems by Sara Bard Field published by William Edwin Rudge 81 pages, Inscribed by Field on the half-title page to Ellen Van Volkenburg Browne. I believe it says, " For Ellen Van Volkenburg Browne, our "Nellie - who has become for me an urge toward the ideal beauty she has attained. Sara Bard Field Los Gatos, Calif, August, 1929. With her husband, Maurice Browne, Ellen Van Volkenburg was a pioneer in the Little Theatre Movement in America with their Chicago LIttle Theatre.

"Little theatre" may sound as though it involves children's dramatics, but it was in reality art theater, a reaction to the "big theaters" that showed mostly melodramas, musicals and spectacles. It was the Little Theatre Movement that championed dramatists we now take for granted in our repertoire, such as Chekov, Ibsen, Strindberg, Wilde, Shaw, and Maeterlinck. With her commanding presence she was a leading lady, probably playing the title roles in "Hedda Gabler" in Chicago and in Medea. This is the aesthetic Van Volkenburg and Browne brought to Cornish as the founding heads of the theater program together with a thorough knowledge of the latest staging techniques.

Ellen had a further passion: marionettes. Updating the use of puppets at the Chicago Little Theatre as high art, she is credited with coining the term puppeteer. " At Cornish she presented full evening, puppet productions of "Alice in Wonderland" and "Midsummer Night's Dream, the latter being revived in New York some years later. After her Cornish years, Ellen worked with Paul Robeson, Peggy Ashcroft, Sybil Thorndike, and Ralph Richardson at Cornish's sister institution, Dartington Hall, in England. She later appeared in roles on Broadway.

Late in life, Ellen co-edited Nellie Cornish's autobiography. Ellen Van Volkenburg: artist, citizen, innovator.