About

Photograph of Sarah Orne Jewett from 1870. Jewett wears a lace-collared gown and has a slight smile on her face.

About Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909)

by Terry Heller, founder of the Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project

Theodora Sarah Orne Jewett was born in South Berwick, Maine, on 3 September 1849, the second of three daughters of physician and professor of medicine Theodore Herman Jewett (1815-1878) and Caroline Frances Perry Jewett (1820-1891). Sarah's fragile health often kept her away from her private schools. When able enough, she accompanied her father on his country rounds, observing with him the local people and the natural world. After graduating from Berwick Academy in 1865, she enjoyed long visits with extended family, in Portland, ME, Boston, New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago. She developed and maintained strong relationships with aunts, uncles, and cousins. After her father's death, she remained closest to her older sister, Mary (1847-1930). There is no record of courtship, and Sarah did not marry. Her deepest adult friendships, outside her family, included artists Sarah Wyman Whitman (1842-1904) and Louisa Dresel (1864-

1958), poet and artist, Celia Thaxter (1835-1894), and the poets John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892) and Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836-1907). Jewett's correspondence illustrates the importance of these and the many other friendships she maintained. She wrote, "Love isn't blind; it's only love that sees!", and friendship remained a central theme of her writing.

In about 1882, Jewett found her life partner in Boston poet, biographer, and social worker Annie Adams Fields (1834-1915), wife of author and publisher James T. Fields (1817-1881). Upon Mr. Fields's death, Jewett and Mrs. Fields began an intimate relationship that lasted until Jewett's death, with Jewett dividing her time between her home in South Berwick, ME and Fields's homes in Boston and Manchester-by-the-Sea, MA. Jewett's literary career was well begun before she met Fields, but their partnership became professional as well as personal, and Jewett blossomed. They shared their travels and friendships, and their reading and intellectual tastes. They read and discussed each other's work.

During her relatively short literary career (1869-1902), Jewett published six novels, nine short story collections, and one popular history. More than 200 more short works of fiction, prose, and poetry were collected in various volumes after her death.

Critical attention has concentrated on three novels and a few short stories. Deephaven (1877) recounts the experiences of two young Boston women during a summer spent in a rural village on the Maine coast. A Country Doctor (1884) follows the growth of a female physician from childhood to the beginning of her professional career. In The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) a middle-aged, urban woman writer makes a summer retreat to a rural Maine village. Though about a dozen of Jewett's short stories have drawn substantial critical attention, two stand out. In "A White Heron" (1886), a young girl resists the temptation to help an ornithologist "collect" the heron she has come to value. In "The Foreigner," the narrator from Pointed Firs hears the story of a French-born widow who lost her family to illness on a colonial Caribbean island and found herself exiled in a Maine village.

Jewett's professional development is marked by a few points at which her writing took new directions. The works associated with these have not always drawn much critical attention, mainly because they tend to be more interesting biographically than for their literary appeal. Her first short story in The Atlantic, "Mr. Bruce" (1869), is undistinguished, but it caught the attention of editors Horace Scudder (1838-1902) and William Dean Howells (1837-1920), who later helped her make a major advance in her career by encouraging her to transform a small group of local color sketches into her first novel, Deephaven, which was well-received and launched her career.

Before composing Deephaven, Jewett had solved the problem of her vocation. Having treated writing as an avocation, she decided that she had a calling to authorship. Her biographical story, "Tame Indians" (1875) marks this realization. Jewett narrates her 1872 visit to an Oneida reservation near Green Bay, WI. She wrote to an early mentor, law professor Theophilus Parsons (1797-1882), that this visit helped her realize her vocation to be one of converting strangers into neighbors and friends by telling stories. In her 1893 preface to a new edition of Deephaven, she paraphrased Plato: "the best thing that can be done for the people of a state is to make them acquainted with one another." Jewett's dedication to this mission guided the rest of her professional life.

Two events of the 1880s added new dimensions to her work: producing the popular history, The Story of the Normans (1887), and spending several weeks in St. Augustine, FL (1888). Though the history was well-received and sold well, few posthumous critics have taken it seriously, and it remains poorly understood. Undertaking a task in which she was interested, but for which she was woefully underprepared, was humbling, and it disciplined her subsequent work. Perhaps more important, the task enlarged her perspective, leading her to see her fiction-writing in a world-historical context. There, she articulated for herself the belief that history is directed by a divine will toward progress. History shows that though human life is replete with folly and suffering, violence, disease and disaster, still by "the power of spiritual forces and God's great purposes, this whole world is nearer every year to the highest level any fortunate part of it has ever gained." This progressivist belief pervades her fiction, but more noticeably after 1887. Though some critics have seen the idea as naïve, it remains a popular strain in Christian thought, often expressed in the 21st century by reference to the faith of Martin Luther King, Jr., who believed that though the daily horrors resulting from America's foolish racism lengthened "the arc of the moral universe," still "it bends toward justice."

When Jewett took the seriously ill Annie Fields to recover in St. Augustine, FL, in the winter and spring of 1888, she was deeply impressed with the cosmopolitan culture of the city: "I didn't know there was such a place as this in America!" In her little-known story, "Jim's Little Woman" (1890), she captures much of what she saw as the comparatively easy association of multiple cultures. This contrasts with "The Foreigner," in which a New England village fails to integrate a forlorn immigrant. Jewett's fiction after 1888 shows a new interest in telling stories about immigrants, especially the Irish, whose families were her employees and neighbors back in South Berwick and in Boston. Jack Morgan and Louis Renza collected eight pieces in The Irish Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (1996). The earliest of these was "The Luck of the Bogans" (1889).

During what turned out to be the final six years of Jewett's literary career, 1896-1902, friendship and travel continued to influence her work. She interrupted composition of The Country of the Pointed Firs in 1896 to cruise the Caribbean on a steam yacht with Fields, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and others. During the summer of 1896, as she completed Pointed Firs, she corresponded with Mary Augusta Ward (1851-1920), who was completing Sir George Tressady, while each read each other's work in progress. Jewett and Fields traveled to Quebec in 1897 and returned to Europe in 1898 and 1900. Especially important were the weeks they spent in Provence, Brittany, and at the home of Marie Thérèse de Solms Blanc (1840-1907) in 1898. Traces of the Caribbean tour and the French tour of 1898 appear in her major publications after 1896, especially the four stories in which she revisited the setting and characters of Pointed Firs: "A Dunnet Shepherdess (1899), "The Queen's Twin" (1899), "The Foreigner" (1900) and the posthumous "William's Wedding," and in her final novel, The Tory Lover (1901).

The Tory Lover is a historical narrative set during the American Revolution and featuring events in England and France as well as in her home region in New England. Though critics have shown little interest in the novel, she considered it her best work, at least on level with Pointed Firs, and it was a critical and economic success, though she had hoped it would be more popular.

Her flourishing literary career was cut short in 1902, when head injuries from a nearly fatal carriage accident left her unable to publish. She continued a rich correspondence until her death after a stroke in 1909. Among her correspondents in these years was Willa Cather (1873-1947), who credited Jewett with inspiring her to make fiction-writing her own career.

Biographies and Further Reading

Paula Blanchard, Sarah Orne Jewett, her World and her Work, 1994.

John E. Frost, Sarah Orne Jewett, 1960.

F. O. Mathiessen, Sarah Orne Jewett, 1929.

Elizabeth Silverthorne, Sarah Orne Jewett: A Writer's Life, 1993.

Meet the Founders

Four founders, three states, two continents, one vision.

St. David's Episcopal Church | Austin, TX

Anna E. Beaudry

Anna is newly the Director of Spiritual Formation at St. David's Episcopal Church in Austin, TX, a public-square church that works tirelessly for social justice and radical love in the heart of Texas's capitol city. She previously worked as Assistant Director of Fellowships & Awards at Baylor University.

Anna early their PhD in 19th-century American literature in 2024 from Baylor. Their dissertation compares four female writers from the New England regionalist movement, examining the treatment of geographic and psychological landscapes in their fiction and the ways that people and place shape each other. Their research has been published in Early American Literature, American Literary Realism, and The Eudora Welty Review. They have a chapter forthcoming Fall 2025 in Radical Transcendentalisms, eds. Alex Moscowitz and Ted Stolze. Their specializations lie in ecocriticism, material feminisms, queer theory, and place-based writing. They also work with Terry Heller on maintaining and continuing The Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project.

University at Albany, SUNY | Albany, NY

Vesna Kuiken

Vesna's expertise and research interests include long Nineteenth-Century American literature, early American literature, ecocriticism, post- and trans-humanism, regionalism, theories of democracy and utopia, and Nineteenth-Century European literature. She is currently completing a book, Islandic Life: Archipelagic Ontologies in American Literature, which uncovers a countercurrent in nineteenth-century American literature and shows how a recourse to archipelagic environmental structures enabled the period’s women writers to revise existing concepts of nature and (gender) politics. Kuiken’s work has appeared in the collection of essays American Impersonal: Essays with Sharon Cameron (Bloomsbury, 2014), J19, The Henry James Review, Arizona Quarterly, and Nineteenth-Century Prose. Her essay “1884: The Princess Casamassima, Anarchy, and James's Materialist Poetics” is the recipient of the Leon Edel Prize for the best essay on Henry James in 2016. She is co-editing, with Branka Arsić, a collection of essays on Henry David Thoreau’s philosophy of the vegetal. She is a lecturer at U Albany.

George Mason University | Fairfax, VA

J. Samaine Lockwood

Samaine Lockwood specializes in American literature and gender and sexuality studies. She is currently working on a book project entitled Tituba: The History of an American Cultural Figure in which she examines how Tituba, one of the first women to be accused of witchcraft during the 1692-93 Salem witch hunt, has been represented since the end of the Civil War when she was first portrayed as biracial (Black and Indigenous). Samaine's first book, Archives of Desire: The Queer Historical Work of New England Regionalism, was published by UNC Press in 2015, and she has published on china collecting, Americans' obsession with Vikings, queer critical regionalism, and Black New England women writers, particularly Ann Petry. Samaine is an Associate Professor of English at George Mason University.

Université Paris Cité | Paris, France

Cécile Roudeau

Cécile Roudeau is Professor of American Literature at Université Paris Cité. Her research focuses on the articulation between literature and politics in the long nineteenth century. Her first book, La Nouvelle-Angleterre: Politique d’une écriture (Sorbonne UP, 2012) read New England regionalism (Jewett and Freeman in particular) as a political attempt to repartition the sensible in the US turn to empire. Roudeau is also the author of the first translation of Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs into French (2004/2022). Her research has appeared in ESQ, Leviathan, William James Studies, Revue Française d’Études Américaines, and the European Journal of American Studies. She is working on a book project provisionally entitled Beyond Stateless Literature: Practices of Democratic Power in Nineteenth-Century US Literature.