"The Little Locksmith," Katharine Butler Hathaway's luminous memoir
of disability, faith, and transformation, is a critically acclaimed
but largely forgotten literary classic brought back into print for
the first time in thirty years. The Little Locksmith begins in 1895
when a specialist straps five-year-old Katharine, then suffering
from spinal tuberculosis, to a board with halters and pulleys in a
failed attempt to prevent her being a "hunchback." Her mother says
that she should be thankful that her parents are able to have her
cared for by a famous surgeon; otherwise, she would grow up to be
like the "little locksmith," who does jobs at their home; he has a
"strange, awful peak in his back." Forced to endure "a horizontal
life of night and day," Katharine remains immobile until age
fifteen, only to find that she, too, has a hunched back and is "no
larger than a ten-year-old child." The Little Locksmith charts
Katharine's struggle to transcend physical limitations and embrace
her life, her body and herself in the face of debilitating bouts of
frustration and shame. Her spirit and courage prevail, and she
succeeds in expanding her world far beyond the boundaries
prescribed by her family and society: she attends Radcliffe
College, forms deep friendships, begins to write, and in 1921,
purchases a house of her own in Castine, Maine. There she creates
her home, room by room, fashioning it as a space for guests,
lovers, and artists. "The Little Locksmith" stands as a testimony
to Katharine's aspirations and desires-for independence, for love,
and for the pursuit of her art.
"We tend to forget nowadays that there is more than one variety
of hero (and heroine). Katharine Butler Hathaway, who died last
Christmas Eve, was the kind of heroine whose deeds are rarely
chronicled. They were not spectacular and no medal would have been
appropriate for her. All she did was to take a life which fate had
cast in the mold of a frightful tragedy and redesign it into a
quiet, modest work of art. The life was her own.
"When Katharine Butler was five, she fell victim to spinal
tuberculosis. For ten years she was strapped to a board (that means
one hundred and twenty months, an infinity of days and hours and
minutes)
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