Please pardon the notes: I am still neatening them. Message me if you need a full citation that is not spelled out here yet.1 Paula Blanchard,Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and Her Work (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1994) chpt 1-4, and p89.
2 It goes without saying that Jewett had more options open to her than she would have had otherwise. Her older sister Mary would also decide not to marry, though, as Blanchard notes, even genteel spinsters found themselves freighted with a heavy load of expectations vis-a-vis maintaining a household and cultivating social ties, duties which made potentially heavy demands on time and energy. (pp)
3 Jewett in Library of America volume. "Looking Back on Girlhood" p755. Rptd from Youth's Companion, 7 Jan 1892.
4 Footnote the Liz Ammons essay.
5 Cary, letters, 34. "To Ida Aggasiz Higginson," 2 June 1877.
6 Silverthorne 48-51.
7 Blanchard 60. During the decade that followed, Jewett would develop a strong, steady friendship with Longfellow's daughter Alice.
8 Josephine Donovan, "Jewett and Swedenborg," American Literature, 65:4 (Dec 1993) 731-94, esp 733; and Blanchard 104-5.
9 Jewett, "Looking Back," 758-9.
10 Richard Cary, Letters p22 n 1.
11 Ibid, 24. (To Mrs William G [Morse Fisk] Perry.)
12 Letter to Scudder.
13 I have to depend on Blanchard's paraphrase here for the Howells correspondence 58-9; cite Jewett's early inclinations towards poetry & mention that upon her death, her poetry is what her friends and family had collected into a volume. She did not take Howells' advice either, for up through 1888, at least one of her poems appeared annually (in 1880-81 poetry accounted for half of her appearances)--and yes, they not infrequently were carried in Harper's and the Atlantic.
14 Sklar, (xiv).
15 ca pp74-5
16 Qtd in Donovan, "Jewett & Swedenborg": 734.
17 Cary Letters, 27.
18 Ibid, 29.
19 Qtd in Donovan, 735.
20 Playdays (1878), The Story of the Normans (1887), Betty Leicester (1889), and Betty Leicester's Christmas (1899) to name just the collections.
21 Ann Douglas made this observation in "Literature of Impoverishment," and it was recently echoed by Richard Brodhead in Cultures of Letters.
22 She would soon have, among her circle of friends, the very popular children's writer Sarah Chauncey Woolsey. Also, Celia Thaxter--another close friend--edited her volume of poems for children.
23 For late examples of didactic work see tales in The Queen's Twin & Other Stories. 24 Jewett,"Looking Back" 760 (emphasis mine).
25 The notion that one can overcome the chance circumstances of life though choosing to be humble and make the best of it, with the understanding that obstacles and difficulties are lesson--part of God's divine plan for helping his children grow spiritually was fundamental to Jewett, appearing over and over in her writings. (Deephaven, Betty Leicester, Marsh Rosemary, "Looking Back on Girlhood," and sprinkled through her adult fiction) 'Put down your bucket where you are' was an addage she lived by; that her bucket was bigger than many made her grateful, but did not lead her to advocate for economic reforms or foster in her support for the Populist party.
26 Take, for example, Aunt Kate, the Carews in Deephaven, the snobby, rather hide-bound Aunt in Country, or stories like "The Landscape Chamber," and "The Guests of Mrs Timms."
27 Blanchard gives a compelling reading for "The Dulham Ladies" as a self-parody; Sarah and Mary were quite fond of shopping, and not surprisingly, to feel quite pleased with themselves. pp-. In terms of self-reflexively considering her own process of authorship she has as much in common with the artist from the city as with the husky heroine of Marsh Island. See also Donovan's brief mention of "A Guest at Home." From another angle, Jewett clearly invested a lot of herself in her depiction of Nan Prince in A Country Doctor.
28 This, of course, is 1880. It doesn't really speak to her 20 years as a mature writer. I believe that this is a fair assessment,even given Annie Fields' snobbier worldview and Jewett's new and growing continental frienships.
29 From a collection of letters (ref got lost in all the cutting & pasting)
30 Annie Fields, Letters 58.
31 Cary, Letters, 35.
32 Cary, Letters, 36.
33 Cary, Letters, 33-4.
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