Sarah Orne Jewett (1849 - 1909)

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Sarah Orne Jewett lived most of her life in South Berwick, Maine, a town that served as inspiration for much of her work. Jewett often accompanied her physician father on his rounds around South Berwick, and her interactions provided her with a keen sense of human psychology that she inserted into the character development in her fiction. Jewett never married and famously wrote to a friend that she needed a wife more than a husband. She lived with Annie Adams Fields, who was also an author, until her death in 1909.

Jewett is often placed in the school of “local color” authors, writers in the literary period of Realism and Regionalism who emphasized the importance of place and character development over plot. Her slice of life short fiction epitomizes this literary genre, especially in her most famous collection of short stories, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896). Regionalism tapped into the late nineteenth century feelings of nostalgia surrounding small town life in the face of growing industrialism. In an interview at the end of her career, Jewett said that she was inspired to write fiction when she saw the misconceptions urban dwellers had about country life. She stated, “I was determined to teach the world that country people were not the awkward, ignorant set those people seemed to think. I wished the world to know their grand, simple lives.” The representation of these grand, and often deceptively simple, lives, serve as the foundation of her work.