FELL, MARIAN. 1886-1935.

FELL, MARIAN. 1886-1935.
6 Autograph Letters Signed ("Marian Fell"), and one partial letter, to various Dodge family members, 38 pp total, most approximately 218 x 135 mm, bifolia, some ink drawings, with a small watercolor and 3 small silver print photographs laid-in, Yusspiensky Mine, Siberia, Spassky Zavod, Krasilniki, and Yalta, October 5, 1905 to August 17, 1908, some paper clip marks, clean.

"Olivia, Nelson and I are spending a month at the mine now, seventy miles south of Spassky Zabod where the smelter is. We drove here with six horses or two troikas in eight hours across the rolling yellow steppes and only meeting a camel caravan on the way. There is no town or house within two hundred miles, we are eight hundred miles south of the railroad among the true, unspoiled Kirghiz...." So begins the first of a series of letters from a young Marian Fell, this one to Elizabeth Dodge. Fell moved with her father to Siberia in 1905 at the age of 19, where he made a small fortune operating copper mines in the region. She would return to the states in 1909, and make a name for herself with some of the earliest translations of Chekhov in English, and using their success to found the Marian Fell Library in Fellesmere, Florida. The letters form a fascinating and exciting firsthand account in English of an Anglo family in the mines of the Kirghiz steppes.