The Little Locksmith

Published by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York

The Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016,

First Feminist Press edition, 2000

The lines from the poem “In the Seventies” by Thomas Hardy, which appears on page 219, are reprinted from the Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy (New York: Macmillan, 1926).

Excerpts from The Journals and Letters of The Little Locksmith (New York: Coward-McCann, 1946) that appear in the afterword are reprinted with the kind permission of F. Anthony Butler and Jonathan Reardon, the co-trustees of the Katharine Butler Hathaway Trust. Copyright © 1946 by Coward-McCann, Inc., renewed 1974 by Warren H. Bulter.

No part of this book may be reproduced or used, stored in any information retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the Feminist Press at the City University of New York except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Originally published in 1943 by Coward-McCann, Inc., New York. This edition published by arrangement with the Katharine Butler Hathaway Trust. The Feminist Press especially thanks the co-trustees, F. Anthony Butler and Jonathan Reardon, for making this new edition possible.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hathaway, Katharine Butler, 1890–1942

The little locksmith : a memoir / Katharine Butler Hathaway ; foreword by Alix Kates
Shulman ; afterword by Nancy Mairs

p. cm.

1. Hathaway, Katharine Butler, 1890–1942. 2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. 3. Pott’s disease—Patients—Biography. 4. Women—Maine—Castine—Biography. 5. Castine (Me.)—Biography. I. Title

PS3515.A8615 Z465 2000

362.4′3′092—dc21

[B]

00-020345

eISBN 978-1-55861-710-0

The Feminist Press is grateful to Helene D. Goldfarb, Joanne Markell, Genevieve Vaughan, and Patricia L. Wentworth and Mark Fagan for their generosity in supporting this publication.