SARAH ORNE JEWETT:
Her Early Life and Writing

   Sarah Orne Jewett had the good fortune of finding herself a member of the provincial elite. She was related to the aristocratic Perry's of Exeter, NH and the Jewett's of Berwick, a lineage which gave her an extended family of merchants, sea captains, doctors, and editors. From the outset, she was well-connected to many of the leading families of New England--people who were highly visible in the arenas of politics, education and the arts. Though the regional econmy in New England had settled into a depression, Berwick had not felt the pinch as harshly as other areas, for (via its two railroads) it served as one of the major gateways for summer travellers on their way to the White Mountains or Desert Island or Boothbay Harbor. On the whole, its losses in shipping revenue had been at least partially offset by the appearance of several small mills. 1 Jewett's family in particular had not suffered the downward financial mobility which was/ would be so pressing to many other local colorists; the three Jewett women inherited enough money to be independent. 2 In terms of cultural riches, Jewett was also fortunate. Berwick present her with a provincial environment which had to be to unlearned or otherwise overcome.

   On the contrary, her particular experiences went a long way towards preparing her to participate as an equal and functional insider in metropolitan society. The village was not altogether a backwater affair, for as Jewett would later say, Berwick could claim a noble and important connection to America's past:

"The descendents of the first comers to the town have often been distinguished in the affairs of their time. No village of its size in New England could boast, particularly in the early part of the present century, of a larger number of men and women who kept themselves more closely in touch with 'the best that has been thought and said in the world.'" 3

On a more personal level, Jewett's paternal grandfather had been quite a world traveller in his seafaring days, and she had been raised listening to his stories about exotic ports of call: Berwick and its citizenry had been quite cosmopolitan until the sudden decline of the shipping industry in the 1820s and 30s. 4 His influence prompted Jewett to say: "I thought if I could go off on a voyage I should be perfectly happy." 5 In effect, he helped her to grow up visualizing Berwick as a compass-point from which she could go adventuring into the largest spheres, and to which she could happily return.

   In the face of the town's gradually shrinking horizons, her father, Theodore Herman Jewett, provided another (more contemporary) model for the successful mediation of city and country. On one hand, his medical practice was rural--quiet and retiring in comparison to a high-profile position in a large city amongst an elite clientele. But he had trained in Philadelphia, Boston, and Exeter, became a professor at the Medical School of Maine, a lecturer at Bowdoin's medical school, and was elected president of the Maine Medical Society. He had had plenty of experiences in negotiating metropolitan culture and society, and while living in a quiet place, throughout his life continued to remain abreast of all the current developments in his field, contributing to the larger dialogue through articles he published in the major medical journals of his time. Thus, in terms of immediate role models, neither her grandfather nor her father found the little village particularly narrow or confining.

   These positive models were not enough to save her from a period of emotional exile and estrangement in her twenties, but at least up through her teens Jewett was apparently quite satisfied with the social life available to her. In part this was because she found plenty of stimulating company; for one thing, she was always close to her older sister Mary, and--as the age gap narrowed--became quite close to her younger sister Caroline. Both siblings would choose to stick close to Berwick their whole lives. When Carrie married, she and her husband, "Ned" Eastman, moved from the house she grew up in to "the big house" which had belonged to grandfather Jewett: about 250 feet. Sarah had to beg, plead and threaten in order to pry either of her sisters away from the village, even for something as thrilling as a tour of Europe (though they each did travel domestically now and then on a more regular basis). Outside of the family, she had gone to school with Susan Ward (who would soon co-edit the Independent with her brother Henry and happily provide a steady outlet for Sarah's early writing in their periodical). Jewett and her sisters all belonged to church groups which sponsored plenty of social activities. Between her smart, cosmopolitan family and friends, Berwick presented her with a safe but stimulating environment in which to mature.

   Her overall sense of satisfaction may also have had something to do with the amount of travel available to her, for though she had not been to Europe (as some of her Boston cronies had), the family had been to Canada. Sarah had also spent late winter and early summer of 1868-9 with her Aunt Sarah and Uncle John in Cincinnati; this branch of the family proved surprisingly important to Jewett's writing because both her aunt and uncle were active in the lively literary culture of southern Ohio. 6 Closer to home, Jewett had made numerous trips in and around New England, including frequent visits to friends and family in Boston. For example, "dear darling cousin Nelly" soon became Mrs. John Nichols and settled comforatably into life on Brattle Street just down the way from Longfellow. 7

   Ultimately, Jewett found that being born and raised as a member of an elite (and financially viable) provincial New England family presented no serious obstacles to participation in the "best" circles--whether it be Boston, London, Paris, or Venice. In Jewett's case, geographical proximity to Boston, with its cultural and political energy, with its trans-regional and often national institutions, was a happy accident of birth. Unlike many--or most--regional writers, Jewett would be able to balance the two (for her) not-so-distant sites. She would be able move comfortably from city to country life, developing in the process a growing appreciation for both. By her early 30s, she was firmly and permanently anchored at both ends by deep personal relationships.

STRUGGLING TO BECOME A WOMAN AND A WRITER:
Influences and Audience

   This is not to say that Jewett did not wrestle with herself and the world in order to achieve this equilibrium. Her search for an appropriate life purpose--increasingly as a writer who could influence people for Good--was taking her further and further afield from Berwick at a time when it seemed less appealing than it ever had. Though her early teen years were quite fulfilling, during the period 1869-71, when Sarah was (more or less secretly) enduring the uncertainties of sending her writing out for the first time, a number of her close friends had gotten married and moved away, her favorite grandmother had died, and the woman she adored at the time, Kate Birckhead, was living in the intensely class-conscious and geographically distant town of Newport. In general, through her twenties Jewett struggled with depression, accompanied by outbursts of dissatisfaction with the confines of the village-- Berwick suddenly seemed smaller and shabbier than it had before. 8

   Though her family in general, and her father in particular, had attempted to instill in Jewett an abiding love of and respect for the local countryside and its peoples, (and tho this "peripheral" terrain was saturated with manners and histories which made it central to "America": solid citizens, relatively homogeneous in comparison to any large city) it was never a given that her forays into the metropolitan world might not serve to estrange her permanently. One big reason Jewett was able to maintain such a durable, intimate connection with her home community very likely had to do with its willingness to embrace rather than oppose her growing aspirations. As with Doctor Leslie's supportive relationship of young Nan Prince's professional aspirations in A Country Doctor, Jewett herself felt that her father had been supportive of her youthful ambitions. Looking back, she mused that he had probably suspected she would become a writer long before she did. Apparently the idea did not bother him, or anyone else in the family for that matter. Grandfather Jewett had always fed her ambitions in general, admonishing her with the words of Ben Jonson: "Be bold, be brisk, and be public!"9 Her father seems to have provided her with early and rigorous feedback, ruling her "early attempts at writing by the severity and simplicity of his own good taste" and offering her the advice that would stay with her so clearly throughout her career--not to "write about people and things, [but to] tell them just as they are!'"10

   While the men in her family were important, the Jewett and Perry families also boasted more than its share of intelligent, industrious women whose role models were equally important for the developing writer. For example, her maternal aunt, Lucretia, held an informal salon where the talk ran on the subjects of "poetry, history, and philosophy." 11 One can gauge the nature of their relationship from one of Sarah's letters to her:

I treasure up all you tell me about studying, and I really have accomplished a great deal lately. I have been translating a French novel, & I find I had not forgotten so much as I feared. . . . Then I read a very nice book about ancient Iceland. . . and I have now Ray's Mental Hygiene and Froudes History of Elizabeth, and a book on Instinct in Animals and Men . . . . I allow myself a certain number of pages every day of course exceeding if I like. I find the English history goes off very fast at fifty pages a day, and sometimes a hundred, and I read one of the lectures on Instinct. Last week I had also, Loyola & the Jesuits. . . . (12 May 1872)12

In Aunt Lucretia's interests and apparent admonitions to Jewett one clearly sees the workings of an informal genteel women's self-culture network.

   Aunt Helen in Cincinnati also helped Sarah along. According to current biographical information, Jewett broke into print on the local level with a story and some poems at age 14 (1863). These scant facts point to how much we do not know (and probably will never know) about Sarah's initial relationships to audience--perhaps she gave informal readings for family members or friends, or at church or other community-based functions as Harriet Beecher Stowe had done a generation before. We do know that during a summer stay in Cincinnati with Uncle John and Aunt Helen, (he co-owned and edited the Cincinnati Gazette) Jewett not only took dancing and art lessons, but found a very supportive audience in Aunt Helen's women's reading club. In a letter home she reported that her efforts had been received with great applause. Considering the rigorous nature of Jewett's relationships with female relatives, it seems only fair to say that her later attribution of serious reading tastes [Sterne, Fielding, Smollett and Cervantes] to the men in the family while connecting pleasure-reading [Austen, Eliot and Opliphant] to the women was not quite accurate in the larger picture of role models and influences. What is particularly instructive here, beyond her own over-simplification of gendered tastes, is the extent to which she had positive associations with both audiences and registers, for as I will argue in a moment, she would continue to be aware of and seek the largest possible audience and sphere of influence. She would always trying to balance the needs of both the "serious" and the "pleasure-seeking" reader.

   Chronologically, her return from Cincinnati coincided with her first serious attempts at reaching the publishing worlds beyond the village. In 1868-9 she began plying selected adult's and children's magazines with her work, meeting with important successes in both camps. She placed two stories for adults: "Jenny Garrow's Lovers" ("the first story I ever wrote"--for she had concentrated initially on poetry) in The Flag of Our Union (Boston) and--on only her third try, "Mr Bruce" appeared in The Atlantic. Also during this time, one of her early works for children, "The Baby-House Famine" (a poem), was accepted for Our Young Folks. Throughout her career Jewett would continue to find an outlet for her children's writing, from the outset fostering an important connection with Horace Scudder, then editor of the Riverside Magazine for Young People, as well as appearing regularly throughout the 70s on the children's page of the Independent and in Merry's Museum.

   During this brief exploratory phase, Jewett presented her efforts as something of a lark--a form of playful activity, but the light-hearted, self-deprecatory tone in her letters to editors has perhaps been misleading to critics, for the evidence suggests that she had high expectations for her writing from the very beginning.13 She clearly found it exasperating and demoralizing when she was unable to convince The Atlantic to accept another story in the year following the publication of "Mr. Bruce." When they turned down her next two submissions, she seems to have gone through something of a crisis; she wrote asking them point-blank if she should give up writing. Fortunately for Jewett, William Dean Howells, having recently assumed the editor's chair, wrote her not to give up, saying it was "eminently worth while" for her to continue her efforts, though he did steer her away from poetry, which had been her first love.14 Apparently she had been hoping for such a response and promptly sent him what would become the first of the Deephaven sketches, "The Shore House." In short, her whimsical, humble, personal style notwithstanding, Jewett was ambitious and surprisingly confident from the outset.

   As an aspiring literary artist and children's storyteller, Jewett's sense of her own worth and purpose was already in the process of blossoming before she came under the influence of prominent male mentors such as William Dean Howells, Horace Scudder, and the retired Harvard Professor and Swedenborgian minister, Theophilus Parsons. Part of her ability to reach beyond the expectations of traditional Womanhood, that is, to demonstrate an assertive writerly self even as novice, came from her kinfolks, both women and men, but it was clearly reinforced by the conservative network of women Jewett got involved with through Kate Birckhead and Boston's Trinity Church.

   In the broadest sense, even before Sarah met Annie Adams Fields, the celebrated salon hostess and wife of the American publishing powerhouse James T. Fields and was brought into contact with an even larger community of cultural movers and shakers, Jewett and her circle of friends were already in the process of successfully emphasizing certain aspects of late nineteenth century womanhood in order to participate ever more actively and visibly in the masculine, public sphere. As with the women novelists who were so popular from 1820-70, the "literary domestics" that Mary Kelly describes so vividly in Private Woman: Public Stage, Sarah Jewett and her friends would continue to expand earlier definitions of women's roles through highlighting their duties as nurturing mother figures and selfless guardians of morality. Divine inspiration, Christian responsibility, and increasingly, civic obligation, created in their minds a powerful mandate for cultural activities of all kinds--in Sarah's case, of course, primarily expressing itself through her devotion to writing. As Kathy Sklar says about the ideology of separate spheres, still the climate under which they lived: "Far from instilling obedience, the ideology of domesticity could, [and by the 1870s and 1880s did ] for example, lead women to repudiate both heterosexuality and their familial responsibilities." 15 However, when women like those Jewett met through Trinity, and later through Annie Fields, rebelled against social prescriptions, they generally did so without aligning themselves with any larger group of women, and without larger agendas for radical political or social change. Neither Sarah, nor her friends, or Annie, or the majority of women which would soon constitute Jewett's extensive adult network, explicitly challenged gendered social relations in their search for personal fulfillment. Instead, they quietly but purposively went about extending the definitions of womanliness in order to support and enlarge the acceptable categories for "women's work."

   What the recently-acquired letters from Jewett to Theophilus Parsons have contributed is a particularly vivid, concrete example of part of this process in action. Having already found (in the sense of their initial receptivity to her work, including thoughtful editorial comments) and created (in the sense of her friendly but respectful tone and energetic solicitation of feedback) supportive relationships with editors Horace Scudder and William Dean Howells, Jewett attracted yet another supportive male mentor when she met Parsons at a hotel on Wells Beach in August of 1872. Their meeting, and ensuing friendship, seems to have come at a key point in Jewett's development, at a time when, as I have said, Berwick seemed somewhat drab and confining, and when her initial successes at publishing made her especially receptive to outside reassurances about the acceptability of her ambitions. On the whole, she seems to have been drawn to his delineations of Swedenborgian ideas because they reinforced many of the values, teachings and outlooks which already had been instilled in Jewett by her family in general, and her father, in particular. In fact, Paula Blanchard makes a very compelling case for Parson's role in helping Sarah separate from Dr. Jewett; Parsons' support allowed her to function more and more like a peer with her father while refining and integrating Dr. Jewett's ideas and values as her own.16 In this capacity Parsons was crucial for his whole-hearted support of her ambitions; for example, Jewett confessed that she found it really hard to assert "that cold selfishness of the moment for one's work's sake." "I don't like to shut myself up half of every day and say nobody must interfere with me, when there are dozens of things that I might do," she explained, "I hate not to do them & I'm afraid of being selfish" (25 October 1874).17 He assuaged her fears, assuring her that she could have enormous influence for Good if she was willing to devote herself to her God-given talent and use it to convey moral lessons to her readers. Though she would continue to feel some anxiety about the selfishness and visiblity that authorship required, with Parson's support from the spiritual realm of her life added to the emotional resources of friends and family, Jewett was quickly forming her interests and proclivities into an appealing "duty." As she told Horace Scudder, at the time, editor of Riverside Magazine for Young People:

I am getting quite ambitious and really feel that writing is my work--my business perhaps; and it is so much better than making a mere amusement of it as I used. . . . I even find I have achieved a small reputation already. I am glad to have something to do in the world and something which may prove very helpful and useful if I care to make it so, which I certainly do.18 (1 July 1873)

Two weeks later, in another letter seeking criticism from Scudder on a new piece and asking him about copyright laws (she was already looking ahead to a collection), she was able to add a comforting disclaimer--one which sounded surprisingly like Harriet Beecher Stowe's a generation earlier: "I don't wish to ignore such a great gift as this, God has given me. I have not the slightest conceit on account of it--indeed I believe it frightens me more than it pleases me" (13 July 1873).19

   As Josephine Donovan has argued, Parsons and his Swedenborgian beliefs helped Sarah to see herself "as something of a missionary and a mentor to others, particularly younger women" (both in her life and in her writing); she came to feel that this group was among the most important of her potential audiences: "I have no greater wish," she wrote Parsons, "than to be a good friend to younger girls and I hope to be of more and more use in this way as I grow older." 20 She would amply fulfill this goal in the decades ahead, generously giving of her time and energy to a whole new generation of writers like Alice Brown and Willa Cather. She would also continue to write for children throughout her life. 21 This on-going component of her career, in addition to her problem novel, A Country Doctor, and historical romance, A Tory Lover, has seldom figured in discussions which focus on Jewett; she is more often known primarily as a producer of highly-crafted regional sketches. Feminist critics, upon initially re-discovering Country of the Pointed Firs, celebrated Jewett as the first female (American) literary artist, but as time went on, other scholars suggested that her artistry had never been granted more than a subordinate status in the realms of high culture. They further suggested that Jewett's avoidance of contemporary political issues, a realm which the literary domestics ("sentimentalists") like Stowe had actively depicted, constituted authorship on terms which were regrettably diminished. 22 What needs to be said, however, is that while Jewett did not have it in her constitution to write as bold a manifesto as Stowe, she did, in fact, remain "politically" engaged, not only through her stories about poor widows and orphans, her sympathetic tales about the Irish, her defense of a woman's right to a professional career (A Country Doctor), her genuine commitment to fostering a better understanding between city people and country folk, and her constant pleas for conserving Nature, but also through the traditional feminine practice of "influencing" children. 23

   Given that the academy, until recently, has been largely dismissive of so-called sentimental writing, critics have tended to canonize Jewett as a minor realist, a symbolist, or a prose poet, and to sketch out her writerly development either by completely ignoring her didactic tendencies, or by presenting her career as a gradual but marked progression away from Christian moralism towards "higher" forms like Country. This makes a tidy progressive narrative, but it does not fit the facts; even in her adult fiction Jewett frequently continued to bring the lesson in her stories rather more to the fore than is generally appreciated by a new critical aesthetic. 24 Her sense of authorship as a Christian duty, and in particular, her impulse to play the part of the finger-wagging but affectionate aunt to the next generation of children (little girls in particular), was not merely a passing phase; it remained central to her sense of authorship.

   Ultimately, Parsons was not only helpful in supporting her vocational choice and providing her with a spiritual mandate to justify and ground it, but through books, letters, and in person, he also re-kindled and even fueled Jewett's basic impulse to see in Berwick a place whose inhabitants and natural features were worthy of her attention and respect. When she was a child, she said, "my father never lost a chance of trying to teach me to observe. I owe a great deal to his patience with a heedless little girl given far more to dreams than to accuracy, and with perhaps too little natural sympathy for the dreams of others." 25 In effect, Dr. Jewett had carefully fostered in her a sense of respect for the folks living in the surrounding areas--not allowing in himself, let alone in her, any false sense of condescension. So when Parsons offered an older and more worldly Sarah Jewett a belief system which emphasized that life is what one chooses to make of it because God's goodness is available everywhere, he was, in many ways, simply re-packaging and validating in ecclestical terms the more secular outlook her father had assiduously cultivated in her. 26

   As Jewett tentatively moved towards producing regionalized sketches in the early 70s, the ideas and opinions of this eminently respectable outsider were very reassuring. The more she gave herself over to her the landscapes and peoples of Maine as the subject for her art, the more personal truth she found in Parsons' notions that one is given life circumstances which were created for one's best good, if one could only see it and act accordingly. In the middle of her revisions of her first book, Deephaven, she would write Parsons, telling him that life in Berwick had become "interesting and worth while, while it seemed dull before." She had come back to her early training, discovering that she could still find admirable qualities in initially unlikely places: "You don't know the lessons I get every week from the country people" 27 (24 August 1876).

   To a greater or lesser extent, Jewett, like Charles Chesnutt, would always focus on educating "outsiders" to see the value she had been taught to see and was continuing to learn to appreciate in her quiet surroundings. In terms of subject matter, she would include not only portraits of poor rural farming types, but also representations of elites, figures who represented composites of her own ancestors and herself. Perhaps even more to the point, the relationships she depicts amongst these worthy characters is a complex one. In a significant portion of her writing, village notables, people like herself and members of her family, are presented with great ambivalence and sometimes, with outright disapproval. 28 Far from any simple "othering," she included herself in the world of the village, sometimes as an artist from the city who is trained and won over to a respect for villagers and village life, and sometimes as a member of the community retaining their rural values and connections in the face of experiences with and in the world beyond. 29

   On the whole Jewett wrote in such a way as to win a wide range of people for her audience, that is, for those at home as well as those elsewhere, and for the pleasure-seeking as well as the serious reader. For example, later in her career, she would write to Annie Fields that she had visited some old patients of her father's: "I was not prepared to find Doris and Dan Lester a dozen years older than when we met them last!!! And they had read works of Pinny [one of Jewett's nicknames] and were so affectionate and delightful and talked about father--and made a little feast for she, and it was a perfectly beautiful good time." 30 If she angered or annoyed any of the subjects of her art, it has been lost to literary history. Her manner, both on the page and in person, seems to have generally endeared her to readers at home as well as affecting metropolitan readers in America or abroad.

   That Jewett was astute about potential audiences, and clearly wished to speak to a popular as well as an elite one shows vividly in her attempts to get Henry Mills Alden of Harpers' Monthly to accept "An October Ride" as a companion piece to "An Autumn Holiday." "I have always considered them a pair," she said:

I read them at two clubs which united them still more closely--and though one 'club' was in [nearby] Portsmouth--which dear old town is not distinguished as being literary! I found to my surprise that almost everybody liked the horse sketch best--people whom I thought (to tell the truth) I might be boring with it. And I don't believe it would be out of place in Harper's. I have been brought up to read Harpers. . . . I know that at least a hundred people told me how much they liked it, or told others so, and I think they were a fair sample of your readers. (19 February 1880). 31

A few days later she added:

I am afraid I said some odd things in my first letter about my two small audiences, but I meant that I was not trusting alone to my highly critical friends in Boston--because what many of those would like would be pretty sure not to be "popular"--but the second time I read the sketch, my friends were mostly people who like to be entertained better than to be puzzled, and I thought both together would be a fair example to judge by. (23 February 1880) 32

Jewett feels (rightly, so literary historians tell us) that Harper's has a diverse readership, both provincial and cosmopolitan and strongly. She believes that she can recommend the work to him because it is entertaining on a simple narrative level, but also because it contains enough depth and nuance to bear up under the close scrutiny of a more rigorous reading. However, nothing in her language suggests that her sympathies lie completely with either register. If on one hand she initially had fears that the piece might bore the first group, on the other hand, her characterization of the second group does not suggest their superiority. Their taste, to her mind, is ultimately a tad rarified, for her word choice and tone imply that there is nothing particularly admirable about wishing "to be puzzled."(28) 33 Ultimately then, compared to someone like Edward Eggleston, who felt that his Indiana audience had been shut out of good Eastern society, Jewett found the process of mediation much less daunting. The comparison will become a good deal more stark, for example, once we get to someone like Charles Chesnutt. He finds mediation--the opportunity to appeal successfully to a diverse audience--functionally impossible.

   In her first book, Deephaven, Jewett wrote from the perspective of two summer visitors in search of novelty and adventure (complicated by the fact that one of them has intimate ties to the rural hamlet). In effect, she lead readers to suspect that the author was a genteel Boston girl; however, outside the text she was quick to "come out" as a Maine resident. Privately, in her letters, and later, in biographical and autobiographical accounts of her life she would identify herself, apparently without serious angst, as an insider to the provincial world. When Ida Aggasiz Henderson wrote her praising Deephaven, for example, she replied:

You said one thing in your letter which made me very glad; that you thought I had not made country people ridiculous. I should have been so sorry if I had done that, for I have always liked my out-door life best, and in driving about since I can remember with my father, who is a doctor, I have grown more and more fond of the old-fashioned country-folks. I have always known their ways and I like to be with them. Deephaven is not the result of careful study during one 'summer's vacation', as some persons have thought, but I could write it because it is the fashion of life with which I have always been familiar. . . . And as for the sailors; I have always known them. Nobody knows how I love the sea, and many of my friends have been and are sailors in either the navy or the merchant service and until a few years ago we had much to do with ships. When I was a child the Captains used to come to see my grandfather. . . ." (2 June 1877) 34

Especially given that Jewett could claim a comfortable position as doctor's daughter and captain's granddaughter, she evinced a relatively easy relationship to the village. In fact, in the story itself the two city girls frequently have snobby moments that are never chastised in the narrative; at least to the modern reader, their capacity for finding entertainment and education in this out of the way place is obviously based as much on class priviledge as on any democratic respect for transcendent human equality. This accurately mirrors a certain superiority which Jewett herself did feel, especially during her twenties--the wisdom of the rural people notwithstanding. Her attitude gradually changed as she grew older and more confident, and as her transnational professional network grew, expanding and strengthening her ties to the world beyond the village. This change is nowhere more clear than in the shift in tone from Deephaven (1877), in which the narrator is utterly charmed by her rich (snobby) city friend Kate, to The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), in which the narrator gradually becomes an honorary (integral) member of the rural community of women.

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