Finding Lost Voices: Sarah Orne Jewett
I recently finished reading Benjamin Taylor’s fascinating biography about Willa Cather, Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather (Viking, 2023), where he argues that it was the advice Sarah Orne Jewett (1849 - 1909) gave to Cather in a letter to write from
“…your own quiet centre of life, and write from that to the world that holds offices”
That changed the projection of her writing. That planted her imagination back in the tall prairie grass of Nebraska and led to her writing the Great Plains trilogy: O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918). Sarah Orne Jewett was a literary icon when she dished this advice to Cather. So much so that Cather proposed that her novel, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), was one of three books by American authors (the other two books were The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, and The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne), “which have the possibility of a long, long life.” Yet, as it turns out, Cather was wrong. Fast forward another hundred years to the present, and while most high school students are assigned the works of Twain and Hawthorne, few have ever heard of Sarah Orne Jewett, let alone her classic novel, The Country of Pointed Firs. Why is that?
The Country of the Pointed Firs was serialized in The Atlantic Monthly's January, March, July, and September 1896 issues before it was published as a novel by Houghton, Mifflin, and Company in November 1896. Her book is a deep study of small-town life on the coast of Maine. It is a quiet book centered around a strong female protagonist who is visiting for the summer to write in an old schoolhouse.
After a first brief visit made two or three summers before in the course of a yachting cruise, a lover of Dunnet Landing returned to find the unchanged shores of the pointed firs, the same quaintness of the village with its elaborate conventionalities; all that mixture of remoteness, and childish certainty of being the centre of civilization of which her affectionate dreams had told. One evening in June, a single passenger landed upon the steamboat wharf. The tide was high, there was a fine crowd of spectators, and the younger portion of the company followed her with subdued excitement up the narrow street of the salt-aired, white-clapboarded little town.
—”Chapter 1” The Country of the Pointed Firs)
Later in the book, the protagonist visits Shell-heap Island, where Joanna, a woman who goes to live alone on the island after she lost her love once lived. Joanna lived the rest of her life on the island, fixing up the small cottage left there, tending a garden, and keeping chickens. At first, the townspeople don’t understand Joanna and try and convince her to move back to town, but as time passes, her other way of life is accepted. The succinct way that Jewett describes the place, its history, and the personal history of Joanna, in this section of the book is breathtaking:
The birds were flying all about the field; they fluttered up out of the grass at my feet as I walked along, so tame that I liked to think they kept some happy tradition from summer to summer of the safety of nests and good fellowship of mankind. Poor Joanna's house was gone except the stones of its foundations, and there was little trace of her flower garden except a single faded sprig of much-enduring French pinks, which a great bee and a yellow butterfly were befriending together. I drank at the spring, and thought that now and then some one would follow me from the busy, hard-worked, and simple-thoughted countryside of the mainland, which lay dim and dreamlike in the August haze, as Joanna must have watched it many a day. There was the world, and here was she with eternity well begun. In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong.
But as I stood alone on the island, in the sea-breeze, suddenly there came a sound of distant voices; gay voices and laughter from a pleasure-boat that was going seaward full of boys and girls. I knew, as if she had told me, that poor Joanna must have heard the like on many and many a summer afternoon, and must have welcomed the good cheer in spite of hopelessness and winter weather, and all the sorrow and disappointment in the world.
—“Chapter 15” The Country of the Pointed Firs
Like her protagonist, Jewett was a strong, independent woman who understood small-town life because she grew up in it. She was born and raised in South Berwick, Maine, where she was haunted by the past. Looking at the old gray farmhouses, she wondered what embers of stories glowed in their hearths. Jewett spent her young days shadowing her father, who was the local doctor. She read widely and voraciously; however, the novel she claims made the most profound impression on her was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Pearl of Orr Island (1862). Stowe wrote this book, set on the coast of Maine, at thirteen. In many ways, it was a book that allowed her (as she would later influence Cather) to write about “her own quiet center of life.”
Jewett published her first short story, "Jenny Garrow's Lovers," at 18 under the nom de plume Alice Eliot. But her reputation as a writer began to rise when she published The Country of Pointed Firs at age 47. Literary luminaries of the late 1800s, like William Dean Howells, praised her ability to capture the setting and dialogue of “her people,” Jewett’s work was soon categorized as regional writing. Over the years, it wasn’t just Cather who called Jewett a literary foremother. Her work profoundly influenced Truman Capote.
Jewett lived with Annie Fields for over thirty years. In 1902, Jewett was severely injured in a carriage accident that made her unable to write. She died of a stroke in 1909. She was thought to be one of her day's most important literary figures when she died.
So what happened to cause the near erasure of her work? Why don’t we read The Country of Pointed Firs alongside The Scarlet Letter and Huckleberry Finn? For one thing, regionalist writing, which focused on women’s lives, began to fall out of fashion and be chastised by male critics as literature where nothing much happened. But something did happen in her work; through it, we see the lives of independent women and the things that happened in women’s lives in the late 1800s.
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