Hello agains, dolly!> Author, illustrator track the first hundred years in life of literary classic Hitty

RACHEL FIELD’S HITTY, HER FIRST HUNDRED YEARS, new edition by Rosemary Wells, illustrated by Susan Jeffers, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1999, hardcover, $21.95

There really was a Hitty. She was discovered in an antique shop with her name on a yellowed tag by Maine author Rachel Field and illustrator Dorothy Lathrop. She must have exerted considerable charm on these two women. Their creation of her history — “Hitty: My First Hundred Years” — won the 1930 Newbery Medal, the first time for a woman author.

With the passage of time, girls began to grow up without Hitty. But she wasn’t ready for obscurity — not by a long shot. Once again she worked her magic on just the right pair.

Author Rosemary Wells and illustrator Susan Jeffers were among Hitty’s loyal fans. Although Wells had read the book at least 10 times, admiring Hitty’s “indomitable spirit” and feeling our nation’s history come alive, she was hesitant when Jeffers suggested that they revise and illustrate the book to make it appealing to younger generations.

“At first I didn’t want to touch it,” said Wells. “Hitty was one of the best children’s books of the whole 20th century and it had won a Newbery Medal. In my travels, booksellers and librarians told me I was looking for trouble if I adapted a Newbery winner.”

Fortunately, she was able to overcome her reservations and make the story her own, creating a version that should charm today’s girls as much as the original delighted their grandmothers.

Let’s get this straight: Hitty is no dainty plaything. She’s sort of the Tom Sawyer of the doll world. The adventures she packs into her first century are vivid and engaging.

In the winter of 1829, a peddler stays at a sea captain’s home, exchanging work for food and shelter. For the captain’s daughter, Phoebe Preble, he carves a doll out of mountain-ash wood. A quiet life in Maine, however, is not in the cards for our diminutive heroine.

Capt. Preble decides to take his family on his next ocean voyage. As Phoebe’s constant companion, Hitty triumphs over a storm at sea, the burning of the great ship, being cast adrift in the ocean, being abducted by a tropical island tribe. And that’s just with her first owner.

The doll’s spirit and attitude emerge as she experiences life. And she does not exhibit a trace of the limitations or docility of many anthropomorphic toys. Her devotion to child owners is deep. She is saddened when she is stuffed in a sofa for 15 years and gleeful when a snobby French doll gets her comeuppance. Most poignant is her bewilderment during a Civil War episode.

“When you live on one side of a war, everybody says the other side is good for nothing on this earth. Otherwise it wouldn’t be nice to shoot them. To hear the talk in Philadelphia, the rebels in the South were a mob of scoundrels. The ones I met in Carolina were just plain farm boys. No one but the officers owned a decent pair of shoes. And they all wrote home to their mammas and pappas.”

Hitty’s changing relationships are one of the charms of the book. Each owner is a distinct individual. In the transition from a traditional Maine girlhood to a life at sea, Phoebe sheds inhibitions along with confining outer garments and discovers, to her delight and her mother’s consternation, adventurous elements in her own personality. Little Caroline, for whom Hitty is her only doll, creates an elaborate dollhouse out of an orange crate and gets her friends to make a wardrobe out of scraps. Isabella poses with Hitty under duress and scrambles up a tree the minute her portrait is finished.

“Rachel Field’s Hitty, Her First Hundred Years” is an extraordinarily rich book that will be treasured and passed on well into our just begun century.