Sarah Orne Jewett

1849-1909

Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) was born in South Berwick, Maine. Her father was a country doctor, and she often accompanied him on his horse-and-buggy rounds among sick people on the local farms. She later said that she got her real education from these trips rather than from her classes at Miss Rayne's School and the Berwick Academy. She had a fine ear for local speech and the native idiom, which she used to good effect in her stories.

Impressed as a girl by the sympathetic depiction of local color in the fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Jewett began to write stories herself, publishing her earliest one, "Jenny Garrow's Lovers," in a Boston weekly when she was eighteen years old. Shortly after her twentieth birthday, her work was accepted by the prestigious Atlantic Monthly, and her career was launched. Jewett published her first collection of stories, Deephaven, in 1877.

She read the work of Gustave Flaubert, Emile Zola, Leo Tolstoy, and Henry James, and her style gradually matured, as is evident in the stories that make up the 1886 volume A White Heron and Other Stories. Jewett took her favorite motto from Flaubert, "One should write of ordinary life as if one were writing history." Her masterpiece, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), is a book of scrupulously observed short sketches linked by the narrator's account of her stay in a Maine seacoast village and her growing involvement in the quiet lives of its people.

See also: Local Color: 19th-century Regional Writing in the United States http://kermit.traverse.com/people/dot/jewett.html