Sarah Orne Jewett Biography Quotes 8 Report mistakes

Attr: Published by Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1894

8 Quotes
Occup.	Author
From	USA
Born	September 3, 1849 South Berwick, Maine, USA
Died	June 24, 1909 South Berwick, Maine, USA
Cause	Cancer
Aged	59 years

Early Life and Education
Sarah Orne Jewett was born on September 3, 1849, in South Berwick, Maine, a small mill and shipbuilding town on the Piscataqua River. She was the daughter of Dr. Theodore Herman Jewett, a well-known country physician, and Caroline Frances Perry Jewett. Growing up in a close-knit household with her sisters, including Mary Rice Jewett, she absorbed the stories and cadences of coastal New England that later became the lifeblood of her fiction. A childhood ailment left her with periods of lameness, and long, observant walks became a habit; she also often accompanied her father on his rounds through nearby villages and farms. That early apprenticeship to place, people, and the natural world formed the foundation of her art. She attended local schools and studied at Berwick Academy, but her most formative education came from reading and from attentive listening to the speech and lives of her neighbors.

Apprenticeship to Literature
Jewett began publishing in magazines while still a teenager, contributing sketches and stories to the Atlantic Monthly starting in 1869. The prominent editor and publisher James T. Fields recognized her talent and offered practical encouragement, urging her to draw from the life she knew best. That counsel proved decisive. Her first books gathered these local studies into coherent portraits of New England life, revealing a distinctive voice: restrained, observant, compassionate, and richly attentive to landscape and dialect.

Major Works and Themes
Deephaven (1877) established Jewett as an important chronicler of the Maine coast. A Country Doctor (1884) explored vocation and independence through the story of a young woman physician, reflecting both her admiration for her father and her interest in women's lives and choices. A White Heron and Other Stories (1886) brought together some of her most enduring shorter fiction, including the title tale, a quiet masterpiece of moral decision and deep ecological awareness. Her widely acknowledged masterpiece, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), is a sequence of linked sketches about the fictional fishing village of Dunnet Landing and its memorable figures, notably the herbalist Mrs. Almira Todd. The book exemplifies Jewett's art of the fragment and the mosaic: individual pieces cohere into a community portrait grounded in memory, work, weather, and kinship. She also wrote for younger readers, including Betty Leicester (1889) and Betty Leicester's Christmas (1899), and later attempted a historical romance in The Tory Lover (1901).

Across these works, Jewett's themes include the resilience and limits of small communities, the dignity of aging and solitude, and the moral imagination shaped by a demanding landscape. Her prose eschews melodrama in favor of close observation and a humane irony. She is often identified with American regionalism or local color writing, but her finest work pushes beyond label or locality, using setting as the matrix of character and memory.

Boston Circles and Literary Friendships
Jewett's career unfolded within an influential New England literary world. James T. Fields's mentorship opened doors in Boston, where Jewett formed lasting ties with his widow, Annie Adams Fields. Through the Fields household, she moved with ease among editors and writers such as William Dean Howells, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and the poet Celia Thaxter. These relationships gave Jewett a congenial audience and a circle of friends who valued her subtle craft. Later, she herself became an encourager and adviser. Willa Cather, in particular, looked to Jewett as a model of artistic integrity and as a guide toward treating region not as a picturesque backdrop but as a living repository of memory and meaning. Their correspondence attests to Jewett's generosity to younger writers and her clear sense of literary vocation.

Personal Life
Jewett never married. Her closest and most sustaining relationship was with Annie Adams Fields. Their long partnership, often described as a Boston marriage, joined Jewett's South Berwick home and Fields's Boston residence into a shared domestic and intellectual life. They read, traveled, and entertained friends together, and their companionship provided the stability and sympathetic understanding that nourished Jewett's work. Within her own family, Mary Rice Jewett remained a trusted confidante and collaborator in daily matters, helping to manage the South Berwick household and preserving the networks that linked Jewett to neighbors and kin.

Later Years
In 1902 Jewett suffered injuries in a carriage accident that sharply curtailed her travel and reduced her literary output. She continued to write shorter pieces and to correspond with friends and younger authors, but the sustained work of a novel or book-length sequence was no longer possible. Even as her public presence diminished, her reputation as a master of the short sketch and as a chronicler of coastal Maine solidified. She spent her later years largely between South Berwick and Boston, embedded in the places and friendships that had shaped her career.

Death and Legacy
Sarah Orne Jewett died on June 24, 1909, in South Berwick. Her family home, now preserved as a museum, bears witness to the quiet scale of the world she loved and interpreted. Her legacy rests on the clarity and tact of her prose, her creation of unforgettable figures like Mrs. Todd, and her capacity to draw universal meanings from particular places. By centering women's communities and the everyday heroism of work, care, and memory, she expanded the possibilities of American fiction. Her influence can be traced in writers who treat region as a deep cultural ecology rather than a mere setting, and in those, like Willa Cather, who found in Jewett's example a path toward exact, humane, and durable art.

Our collection contains 8 quotes who is written by Sarah, under the main topics: Wisdom - Friendship - Writing - Equality - Aging.

Other people realated to Sarah: James Thomas Fields (Publisher)

Sarah Orne Jewett Famous Works