She could repeat lines of verse after hearing them only once. Though she remembered with pleasure playing Shylock in
The Merchant of Venice and Rebecca in
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, a performance of
Peter Pan to which her parents took her made her decide to become a great actress.
In the Stockbridge house where Field lived, she spent much of her time in a cellar workroom that she had fixed up for her own use. But when her mother decided "that something really had to be done about my education, for it certainly looked as if I were going to grow up illiterate," the family moved to Springfield, Massachusetts, where Field entered public schools.
Although, Field recalls, report-card day was a terror every time, she moved up through algebra, geometry, and Latin grammar, hurdles she feared would never let her graduate from high school. She was not above trading compositions she had written to students who would do her harder work, especially arithmetic. It was especially trying for Field when teachers considered those compositions traded away better than those she turned in for herself. But finally it was her talent in composition that helped her to graduate.
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