Sarah Orne Jewett collection

Theodora Sarah Orne Jewett was born September 3, 1849, to physician Theodore Herman Jewett and Caroline Frances Perry in South Berwick, Maine. She published as Sarah Orne Jewett. Because often ill as a child, she attended Miss Rayne's School infrequently: instead she drove with her father on his rounds to visit his patients. Jewett graduated from Berwick Academy in 1865 and soon began to write. Her career took off with her submission of short stories to William Dean Howells, assistant editor of The Atlantic Monthly, who then put her in touch with James Fields of Boston's Ticknor and Fields. Placing her work with the Atlantic throughout her life, Jewett gathered stories into periodic book collections. Her first successful novel was Deephaven (1877), though she is best known for The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896). Fields's wife Annie and Jewett became close friends. After the deaths of Annie's husband and Sarah's father, the two women became companions in a "Boston marriage." They traveled together throughout the United States and Europe. They resided at Jewett's home in South Berwick as well as in Fields's homes in Boston and Manchester by the Sea. Jewett, considered regionalist or "local colorist," wrote about New England life and captured the native accent, diction, and syntax especially of Maine's people. Jewett's novel, A Country Doctor (1884), among other titles, suggests her feminist awareness of women's larger capabilities. Other works consider issues of domestic culture, class structure, ecology, and the natural world. Influenced by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Jewett often invited her to Boston gatherings at the Fields' home. There Jewett met and influenced Willa Cather. Other women in the social circle of artists and writers included Harriet Prescott Spofford, Celia Thaxter, and Sarah Wyman Whitman. In 1901 Jewett became the first woman to receive an honorary Litt.D. degree from Bowdoin College, her father's alma mater. Just one year later, she suffered crippling injuries in a carriage accident, thereby limiting her physical mobility and hence her writing. After suffering a first stroke in March 1909 and a second June 23, 1909, Jewett died. Jewett's South Berwick home, maintained by Historic New England, welcomes visitors.