Rachel Field's Hitty

Hitty Her First Hundred Years is a memoir written in the voice of a doll, Mehitabel, Hitty for short, constructed in 1822 from the wood of a Mountain Ash tree from Ireland by a peddler stranded during a winter storm at a house in Maine. After giving the doll to the young daughter of the house,  Phoebe, whose father is a captain on a whaling ship, Hitty embarks on many adventures throughout the world, meeting many interesting people along the way.

The adventures of Hitty were inspired by a doll purchased by the author, Rachel Fields, which now resides at the Stockbridge Library Association in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Hitty was awarded the Newbery Medal for Excellence in 1930.

Hitty was rewritten by Susan Jeffers and Rosemary Wells in 1999, updated, simplified, and released as Rachel Field’s Hitty, and with an addition of the doll’s experiences during the American Civil War.

First published in 1929 by MacMillan with red decorative cloth.