She purchased a house in Boston at 92 Mt. Vernon Street in 1876 and established a studio on its top floor. The house, located in Beacon Hill is on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail. Six years later she purchased a farm in Shelburne, New Hampshire, with views overlooking Mount Washington, Mount Adams, and Mount Madison. She lived at her home on Mt. Vernon Street until October 1893 when she moved to Beacon Street at the Charlesgate Hotel, near her statue of Leif Erikson on Commonwealth Avenue. She lived with and shared her life with Abby Adeline Manning (1836–1906), who devoted her life to Whitney. Whitney Manning lived abroad in the 1860s and 1870s, in Rome, Florence, and Paris. They had what was called a "Boston marriage", a term for a long-term relationship between upper-class, educated women, which was generally accepted within the community. Fields said of the relationship, "the two women complement and repose each other."