Loom and spindle : $b or life among the early mill girls with a sketch of "the Lowell offering" and some of its contributors
John Stuart Mill · en
She found warm friends there,--Harriet Hosmer, Mrs. Jameson, Mr. and
Mrs. S. C. Hall, W. W. Story, and, best of all, William and Mary Howitt.
From “Mary Howitt, an Autobiography,” by her daughter, London, 1889,
I am able to give a slight glimpse of the last years of Margaret
Foley’s life. Mrs. Howitt first speaks of her in 1871, as “the gifted,
generous-hearted New England sculptress.” In June of that year she
went with the Howitts to the Tyrol, where, on setting up housekeeping
together, Mrs. Howitt says,--
“Margaret Foley, a born carpenter and inventor, set to work and made us
all sorts of capital contrivances.” She spent several summers at Meran,
a residence for invalids, celebrated for its grape-cure. In 1877 she
was taken with a stroke of paralysis, the root of the malady being an
affection of the spinal cord, was carried from Rome to Meran, and after
several months of great suffering she died there, Dec. 7, 1877.
During her illness, says Mrs. Howitt, her physician “ordered us to
write to any near friends or relatives she might have, and that, if she
had any affairs to settle, it might be done; but dear Peggy had made
her will, and we were among her nearest friends.”
The friendship of the Howitts for Margaret Foley was very warm and
tender; and she found in their true hearts and in their home that rest
and refreshment her loving spirit craved, and that true sympathy for
her work which is so necessary for the struggling artist.
I first saw Miss Foley in Rome while I was there with my husband in
1874. We had sent her a letter of introduction from Lucy Larcom with
a note, and were invited to take tea with her at 53 Via Margutta, her
home. She received us in a most cordial New England manner; we were to
have visited her studio the next day, but the sudden illness prevented,
and we never saw her again. She was then at work on her “Fountain,” and
spoke of the figures around it as “my children.”
In personal appearance she was very attractive. Of a medium-sized,
lithe figure, with small, unusually strong hands, a high, broad
forehead, which, in connection with her refined features, gave her the
stamp of intellectual power, a luxuriant quantity of soft brown hair,
the longest and thickest I ever saw, merry blue eyes, and a head as
classic and a skin as white as her own beautiful marbles.
Miss Foley’s principal sculptures may be classified in the following
order: Among her medallions are Theodore Parker, Charles Sumner,
Longfellow, Bryant, William and Mary Howitt, Mrs. S. C. Hall, and
perhaps others, said to be “full of purity and grace.”
Her ideal productions are Jeremiah, a colossal bust; Pasquiccia; The
Fountain; The Young Trumpeter; The Timid Bather; Excelsior; The Head of
Joshua; Little Orpheus; Cleopatra; Viola; The Flower Girl; Boy and Cid,
a life-sized group; The Baby Piper (Little Pan); and doubtless many
others which have not come to my notice.