かつて、日本文学の英訳アンソロジーを企画したアンナ・シェルコフという人がいました。日本ではシェルコフ（又はシェリコフ）夫人として知られるその人の事績について米国の資料をもとに辿りつつあります。彼女の残した唯一の小説 Nurse's Story の解説を 始めました。
Articles in this section describe the life of Anna Schoellkopf who planned to edit an anthology of contemporary Japanese literature one century ago. Some of them are given in both Japanese and English.
Of course, Adele Bleneau, the heroine and the nominal author of the novel was not Anna herself, however, the experience of Anna must have been projected on Adele.
Adele Bleneau, lived in a plantation in the suburb of New Orleans, Louisiana with her father, a doctor with brilliant skills, and elderly Mademoiselle, her governess. Her mother had passed away when Adele was born.
On the other hand, Anna Schoellkopf grew up on a plantation in Eutaw, Alabama. But her father was a farmer, and Eutaw might have been more rural than the outskirts of the Louisiana capital. But the city was her familiar place, since she stayed one or two years in New Orleans with J. W. Johnson, her husband and an ex-classmate after their graduation from Howard College (Samford University). Johnson was a student of the medical school of New Orleans. The plantation life of the Bleneau family in Mississippi riverbank in chapter one reminds us of their Louisiana days and also her life in Eutaw.
Considering the publishing year, Adele is assumed to be born in the mid-1890s. At that time, her father might have been twenty-three or four, leading to the fact that he was born around 1870. Because Anna Schoellkopf was born officially in 1883 and actually in 1876, her age was just between Adele and her parents. Although Anna’s parents were not of French origin, Anna’s personal history on other aspects was reflected both on Adele and her mother. Anna grew up in a plantation as Adele, and became a physician’s wife as Adele’s mother. Anna might have had a chance to study nursery.
Her grandfather was set to have been a young officer of the Second French Empire (1852-1870), therefore he must have been born in the 1840s. Mrs. Wolcott, or Mademoiselle, who was born in 1851 was of the same generation or little younger than him, so her age was appropriate as the governess of father Bleneau.
In the novel, Mademoiselle said “in looking at Adele I am often startled, the resemblance is so strong.” She also said she had coppery hair. Here, I’d like to comment on an apparent feature of Anna’s hair color.
Her hair color was known from at least three articles. The image of ‘Description of Applicant’ is taken from her passport application in 1915, informed that Anna had ‘auburn’ hair. The same word was used in the interview by newspaper reporters in Chicago, published in Los Angeles Herald of Oct. 6, 1915, when Anna and Walter were on the way to trans-Pacific travel to Japan.
Recently, Ms. Maddie Benton wrote a report in The Jefferson Journal of Jefferson County Historical Association, entitled “Anna Judge, An Alabama Icon.” The writer is a student of Samford University, who interviewed Ms. Anna Schoellkopf Lacher, granddaughter of Anna and Walter at her home in South Carolina. Ms. Benton took a photograph of the painted portrait of Anna Schoellkopf being handed down to her granddaughter. This may be the only multi-colored material informing her features.
We can point out some episodes in this novel that reflected the biographical experience of Anna Schoellkopf. At first, we will pay attention to ‘Mademoiselle,’ the governess of Adele having appeared without name. She was said to have been also a governess of her father. In this story, she went to Paris with Adele, helping and advising for purchasing materials being required for aid stations in fields. She played as a mentor or guardian of young Adele but never been to the field as well as having played no special roles in the plot of the novel.
The model of Mademoiselle is considered to be Frances Metcalfe Wolcott who accompanied Anna for her trip to Europe. She also went with her and Walter to Japan near the end of this year, and was introduced in Japanese magazine articles as Senator Wolcott’s wife.
She was born as Frances Esther Metcalfe in 1851 in Buffalo. She married Lyman K. Bass, a US Representative in 1874, and was widowed in 1889. In the following year she remarried Edward O. Wolcott as his first wife. They divorced in 1899 before he died in 1905. Later, she published her autobiography Heritage of Years: Kaleidoscopic Memories.
Her younger brother James Stetson Metcalfe was a play critic. And his wife Elizabeth Tyree was an actress who retired just before Anna’s first stage appearance. Local connection in Buffalo as well as the carries in Broadway might have made their distance closer.
There was a letter attached on the application, to Robert Lansing from George Marvin. Lansing was Counselor of the United States Department of State at that time, then he became the Secretary of State leading to the Lansing-Ishii Agreement. The position of Marvin is unknown, but he seems to have made the answer to the inquiry from a higher government office.
The attached document guaranteed the responsibility of Anna, and clearly stated the accompaniment of Mrs. Wolcott. It must have been beneficial for her travel during the war. Mrs. Wolcott was twenty-five years older than Anna, corresponding to the impression from the novel, since her age was forty years senior to Adele’s assumed age in the story.
アンナの住所はバファローのデラウェア街864番地である。現在、この住所にはバファロー国際支援機構（International Institute of Buffalo）の建物がある。当組織のウェブサイトによれば、建物は1898年に設計されたというから、シェルコフ夫妻が住んでいた邸宅が残っていることがわかる。
Existence of four passport applications of Anna Schoellkopf was confirmed in the FamilySearch, a genealogical web database. Two of those were issued for Walter Schoellkopf in which Anna was added as the wife. In those days, passports did not always belong to individual persons. The shown image is the top page of the document of application for Anna’s travel to Europe in 1915.
Since Walter did not go with her on this trip, she applied for her own passport. They lived at 864 Delaware Avenue which has been the center of their social life. The house of this address is now occupied by the International Institute of Buffalo. According to the description of its web site, the mansion was designed in 1898, so Anna and Walter must have exactly lived there.
She wrote England, Italy, France, Spain, and Netherlands as her destinations, and Belgium initially listed was eliminated. It seems to indicate that the serious situation of Belgium was not recognized by her, most of which territory was already occupied by the German Army. She set her returning deadline within six months. Maybe she had listed so many countries because she scheduled to travel around all countries, otherwise, she did not make a solid plan.
She declared the purposes of her visit as ‘travelling for pleasure,’ then corrected it into ‘legal and literary business.’ Of course, a pleasure trip in the countries at war must have been considered to be inappropriate, but she did not mention voluntary nursing in field hospitals. She might have tried to hide her real purpose. But it was not illegal, as many women contributed as voluntary nurses in battle fields. It amounted to about twenty-five thousand only in the US, and many of them had the backgrounds of upper-middle classes (‘Introduction’ in Nurses at the Front, ed. by M. R. Higonnet. Northwestern Univ. Press, 2001.)
The next page of the document, her portrait photograph was attached which is also given in Find-a-Grave, a database site gathering tombs and epitaphs.
