Sarah Orne Jewett

The story of an unlikely friendship between a writer and her elderly neighbor set against the evocative backdrop of a remote and beautiful coastal town in Maine, The Country of Pointed Firs is generally considered Sarah Orne Jewett‘s greatest work, and is soon to be published in the Melville House Classic Novella series.

It is also a work of pioneering literary sophistication, a loosely structured series of linked sketches that accumulate in poignancy and power as they depict a dying bit of Americana — the fishing villages of nineteenth-century New England and the gruff and determined people who lived in them. Their stirring fight against the hardships of isolation, and Jewett’s elegantly shaped prose and unblinking perceptiveness, combine to make this, as Henry James called it, “a beautiful little quantum of achievement.”

Sarah Orne Jewett was born in 1849 in the small seaport of South Berwick, Maine, where her father was a doctor. As a girl she often accompanied him on his rounds as he cared for the families of local fisherman and farmers, and she grew to have a deep-seated affection for the people and environs. From an early age she suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and was unable to attend school on a regular basis, so her father encouraged her to supplement her education by reading from his extensive library. It led to a passion for literature, which in turn led her to writing, and at age nineteen she sold a story to The Atlantic Monthly magazine. There, editor William Dean Howells was so taken with her tales about “Deephaven” — a thinly-veiled South Berwick — that he encouraged her to link them into a novel, subsequently published in 1877 as Deephaven. She would continue to write about the region in numerous stories, such as in the collection, A White Heron and Other Stories; in novels such as A Country Doctor, an homage to her father; and in children’s books, including Play Days. Jewett never married but after the 1881 death of her close friend, Atlantic publisher James Thomas Fields, she took up residence with his widow, writer Annie Fields. They would remain together until Jewett’s death, from a stroke, on this day in 1909 in South Berwick