Jewett, Sarah Orne

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JEWETT, Sarah Orne

JEWETT, Sarah Orne (b. 3 September 1849; d. 24 June 1909), writer.

Theodora Sarah Orne Jewett was born and raised in South Berwick, Maine, the second of three daughters in a close-knit, wealthy New England family. She particularly adored her father, Theodore Herman Jewett, a respected physician who encouraged her wide-ranging intellectual curiosity and love of books, and often invited her to accompany him on his rural rounds. Her relationship with her mother, Caroline Perry, is less well documented but was certainly shaped by Perry's chronic illness; from her, Jewett likely first learned to attend to the feminine intricacies of Victorian social engagement. Jewett herself was unwell for much of her childhood; she suffered from rheumatoid arthritis throughout her life. Pain, in combination with a general disinterest in formal education (she often chided herself for "laziness"), resulted in frequent absences from school and pushed her outside into the fields and woods of Maine. She was, in this and other respects, a tomboy, but never at the expense of her social duties. This combination of individual freedom and female ritual animates the best of her writing; her stories and sketches are populated by intelligent women who are both hardy and independent and, whatever their station, genteel.

Jewett published her first story, "Jenny Garrow's Lovers," in 1868, but her first major work was Deephaven (1877), compiled from a series of sketches originally published in The Atlantic Monthly. The story concerns two young Boston women, Kate Lancaster and Helen Denis, who spend an unchaperoned summer together exploring a Maine seacoast village. As with most of Jewett's writing, she drew from life to paint the village and its environs, and also the romantic friendship that existed between the work's two protagonists. Throughout her young adulthood, Jewett developed a succession of passionate romantic friendships with other young women; it is widely considered that Kate Birckhead, with whom Jewett was especially close while she was writing the early Deephaven sketches, was a significant model for the fictional Kate.

Jewett never seriously considered marriage. On top of her family wealth, she achieved literary success early

enough to be fairly comfortable, and she adeptly managed her own finances. More broadly, Jewett considered it important that women should have a choice whether or not to marry and was a vocal advocate for women's education and entry into the professions. Her novel A Country Doctor (1884), considered her most autobiographical, was also the most strongly feminist in this regard; protagonist Nan Prince, following on the heels of her adoptive father, becomes a rural physician but is clearly forced, in the process, to choose career over marriage. Although almost none of Jewett's other major works address these issues so overtly (one exception is the often-anthologized story "A White Heron" [1886]), her writing throughout her life, while conservative on many counts, is filled with independent women protagonists who thrive in female-dominated circles of influence. Her best-known work, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), contains particularly strong depictions of the vitality and variety of women's relationships in rural Maine society. Indeed, Jewett advised her young friend Willa Cather in 1908 that Cather should avoid writing from a man's point of view altogether.

Jewett was not, as some ill-informed critics claim, a lonely spinster; she was involved, from 1882 until her death, in a "Boston marriage" (some call it the Boston marriage) with philanthropist Annie Fields, widow of Atlantic publisher James Fields. Although the relationship is not generally understood to have been sexual, there is no doubt that it was committed and intense and sustained both of them emotionally, physically, and spiritually. They wrote passionate letters to one another (Jewett was, unsurprisingly, the more effusive correspondent); they lived and traveled together; they shared literary, political, and personal decisions. As a result, they developed a supportive and strongly egalitarian relationship, each woman complementing the other's talents. In addition, in the famed Victorian library of 108 Charles Street, they were at the center of a formidable international literary and intellectual circle. Many of their close friends also lived in Boston marriages; Fields and Jewett were part of a group of influential women educators, social reformers, authors, artists, and philanthropists, some of whom shared Jewett's particular desire to live a useful life in the company of other women.

Jewett published prolifically despite the fact that she found writing difficult in the midst of her many other activities (she also had to divide her time between Boston and the Jewett home in Maine, where she still held responsibilities), and despite often being in considerable pain. Her other major works include Country By-Ways (1881), A Marsh Island (1885), Strangers and Wayfarers (1890), The Queen's Twin and Other Stories (1898), and The Tory Lover (1900).