15 cents per book sold was less than the average author pay of 10%. She wrote to her publisher James T. Fields, who initially ignored her, and eventually claimed that he spent more money on publishing and advertising her books than average. She learned, too, that Sophia Hawthorne, widow of the author Nathaniel Hawthorne, was also having similar trouble with Field's publishing house Ticknor and Fields. She abruptly ended her friendship with Ticknor's wife Annie Adams Fields in February 1868, and Mrs. Fields eventually destroyed all the letters from her former friend. In her journal a month later, she wrote of her distress, "We do not forget to feel still the savagery... of Gail Hamilton... I really thought she cared for me! And now to find it was a pretense or a stepping-stone merely is something to shudder over. And all for a little of this world's poor money!" After months of back and forth, during which Dodge came to distrust Ticknor and Fields and wrote to other authors including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Harriet Beecher Stowe to discredit them, she anonymously published A Battle of the Books in 1870 chronicling her negative experiences. While working on a biography of James Blaine, she had a stroke, leaving her in a coma that lasted for several weeks. She then returned to Hamilton, before dying of a cerebral hemorrhage on August 17, 1896. Selected writings Country Living and Country Thinking (1864) Woman's Wrongs: A Counter-irritant (1868) A Battle of the Books (1870) Gala-Days (1871) Woman's Worth and Worthlessness (1872) References External links Essays by Gail Hamilton at Quotidiana.org 1833 births 1896 deaths American women essayists American essayists 19th-century American women writers 19th-century American writers 19th-century essayists Blind writers