SIGNED ENGRAVING of "The Miracle Worker"

[pre-1905]. Engraving. Old dampstaining and soiling to bottom blank margin with only a very slight effect on the signature. Easily Very Good or better. Early 3-3/4" x 5-3/4" engraving from a photograph on a 7" x 10" sheet tipped to a slightly larger sheet of Helen Keller's famous teacher, subject of the play and movie THE MIRACLE WORKER, SIGNED in ink below the image: "Anne Mansfield Sullivan." At the age of 7, nearly blind from an illness two years before and recently having suffered the loss of her mother, Sullivan was abandoned by her father in an orphanage with no formal educational facilities. Through her own will she managed to be placed in the Perkins Institute for the Blind from which she graduated as class valedictorian after regaining much of her eyesight from a series of operations. She began teaching Helen Keller when the deaf and blind child was seven and, by all accounts, quite undisciplined. Sullivan attended classes with Keller and tutored her through the Perkins Institute, The Cambridge School for Young Ladies, and Radcliffe College, all along achieving a measure of success with her unusual student previously unheard of. After Keller's formal education, Anne Sullivan continued to assist her by accompanying Keller on her travels and on various lecture tours. Sullivan married a young Harvard instructor, John Albert Macy, in 1905, and started going by the name Anne Sullivan Macy, thus dating this engraving before that date. The three lived together until 1912 when the Macys separated. After Keller's death in 1968, her ashes were placed next to her beloved companions, Anne Sullivan and Polly Thomson, in the St. Joseph's Chapel of Washington Cathedral.