Looking Back on Girlhood
12 (p. 365) Nathan Lord, . . . his Grace the Duke of Clarence, son of his Majesty the King: Nathan Lord (1758-1807) fought for the American Revolutionary cause as a privateer. The Duke of Clarence was Prince William Henry (1765-1837); the third son of King George III, he later became King William IV.
13 (p. 366) “The Scenes of Clerical Life,” and the delightful stories of Mrs. Oliphant: Scenes of a Clerical Life is a collection of three stories by George Eliot. Margaret Oliphant (1828-1897) was a Scottish author.
INSPIRED BY SARAH ORNE JEWETT
Sarah Orne Jewett was a genius in her use of the “local color” writing style. This literary approach—mostly used in short stories and nonfiction sketches—was immensely popular during the four decades after the end of the Civil War. With varying degrees of commercial and aesthetic success, local colorists described the lives and folkways of people whose cultural identities were unique to a particular region, as well as the landscapes associated with those localities. Jewett’s style was influenced by several authors whose works she read during her teenage years, including Louisa May Alcott and Harriet Beecher Stowe. In the mid-1860s, Jewett read Stowe’s 1862 book The Pearl of Orr’s Island, which inspired the aspiring author to portray in her writings the everyday life and customs of the inhabitants of the Maine coast, where she grew up. In turn, Jewett’s mastery of the local color style was to strongly influence another American author, Willa Cather.
Cather, whose masterpieces O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918) brilliantly evoke life on the American prairie, greatly admired the author of The Country of the Pointed Firs. Jewett’s influence, in fact, was crucial in shaping Cather’s career. In her critical study Sarah Orne Jewett (1980; see “For Further Reading”), Josephine Donovan notes that Cather “despaired of ever writing about Nebraska before she met Jewett.” The two authors developed a friendship and corresponded in the last year of Jewett’s life, during which time Jewett—who had read Cather’s early stories—encouraged the young author to write about the Nebraska pioneers she knew during her youth. Jewett advised Cather regarding the latter author’s approach to her work. According to Cather, Jewett said: “Write it as it is, don’t try to make it like this or that. You can’t do it in anybody else’s way—you will have to make a way of your own” (from an interview with Cather in the Philadelphia Record, August 9, 1913).
Born in Virginia and raised in Nebraska from age eight, Cather depicted the lives of immigrants in Nebraska with the same heightened level of honesty and sensitivity that Jewett brought to her stories about life in coastal Maine. O Pioneers!, Cather’s second novel, describes the hardships and moral fortitude of the women who helped establish farms and communities on the Nebraska frontier. The story centers on the courageous Swedish settler Alexandra Bergson, who transforms her father’s windswept land into a prospering farm. My Ántonia, Cather’s fourth novel and often considered her finest work, takes the form of a memoir about the Bohemian immigrant Ántonia Shimerda, as told by her childhood friend Jim Burden. Many hardships befall Ántonia in her early life, including her father’s suicide, the back-breaking farm labor of her teenage years, and the desertion of her fiancé, who left her to raise their child alone. After twenty years of separation, Jim travels back to Nebraska to find Ántonia married to another Bohemian and, after years of adversity, at last satisfied with her lot.
In an interview published in the May 1921 issue of Bookman magazine, Cather describes how O Pioneers!, her first successful work, grew out of advice from her mentor:
In “Alexander’s Bridge” I was still more preoccupied with trying to write well than with anything else. It takes a great deal of experience to become natural. People grow in honesty as they grow in anything else. A painter or writer must learn to distinguish what is his own from that which he admires. I never abandoned trying to make a compromise between the kind of matter that my experience had given me and the manner of writing which I admired, until I began my second novel, “O Pioneers!” And from the first chapter, I decided not to “write” at all—simply to give myself up to the pleasure of recapturing in memory people and places I had believed forgotten. This was what my friend Sarah Orne Jewett had advised me to do. She said to me that if my life had lain in a part of the world that was without a literature, and I couldn’t tell about it truthfully in the form I most admired, I’d have to make a kind of writing that would tell it, no matter what I lost in the process.
In her book, Donovan points out that Cather and Jewett shared an approach common to local color writing: “Both were more interested in character than in plot, both preferred emotional drama to drama of incident, both were concerned with the character of the locale, both used a spare, simple prose style.” In appreciation of Jewett’s influence on her work, Cather dedicated O Pioneers! to her mentor. The inscription reads, “To the memory of Sarah Orne Jewett, in whose beautiful and delicate work there is the perfection that endures.” In the Philadelphia Record article, Cather noted that she had talked with Jewett about several of the characters in O Pioneers!, and in her dedication to her mentor in that novel Cather said that she “tried to tell the story of the people as truthfully and simply as if I were telling it to her [Jewett] by word of mouth.”
Edith Wharton, known for her portraits of the social life of moneyed New Yorkers, wrote her novella Ethan Frome (1911)—her single piece of writing about New England—as a deliberate argument against Jewett’s sympathetic view of country life. With psychological accuracy the novel tells the tragic story of Ethan, a poor rural farmer, his malevolent wife Zeena, and Zeena’s cousin Mattie, with whom Ethan falls in love. In her autobiography, A Backward Glance (1934), Wharton recalled her desire to respond to Jewett’s optimism, which Wharton viewed as naive: “For years I wanted to draw life as it really was in the derelict mountain villages of New England, a life even in my own time, and a thousandfold more a generation earlier, utterly unlike that seen through the rose-colored spectacles of my predecessors, Mary Wilkins and Sarah Orne Jewett.”
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the texts, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the works, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the works’ history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to examine Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs and Selected Short Fiction from a variety of perspectives and to bring about a richer understanding of these enduring works.
Comments
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
Miss Jewett here gives proof of such powers of observation and characterization as we hope will some day be turned to the advantage of all of us in fiction. Meanwhile we are glad of these studies, so refined, so simple, so exquisitely imbued with a true feeling for the ideal within the real.
—from a review of Deephaven in the
Atlantic Monthly ( June 1877)
HORACE E. SCUDDER
It is situations rather than dramatic action with which Miss Jewett concerns herself, and situations especially which illustrate character. Thus, in the volume before us, “A Native of Winby” sets forth the return to his old village home of a man who has won fame; his appearance, large as life, in the little schoolhouse which knew his boyish inconspicuousness; and his encounter with a woman who, as a girl, had known the boy. It is indicative of the reserve of Miss Jewett, her nice sense of the limits of her art, that she does not resort to any conventional device of rounding out her story, and Mr. Laneway does not pair off with Abby Hender as an effective conclusion. Miss Jewett cares more for the real interest of the situation, for the working of such a nature as Mr. Laneway’s in this half-egotistic, half-shamefaced return. “Decoration Day,” again, as a story, could be told in a few lines, but as a reflection of a half-buried patriotic emotion i
t is of moving power. “The Passing of Sister Barsett” has a witty climax, but, after all, it is the inimitable humor and pathos of the conversation between the two women which make the story a patch of New England life; and if there had been no witty turn, the reader still would have had his half-hour’s worth. “The Flight of Betsey Lane” is the most complete story in the book, but it is a tale of adventure illustrative of character, and never does the reader lose his interest in the quaint figure who has the delightful escapade from any strong attraction to the issue of the story. . . .
It is scarcely expected that Miss Jewett will ever attain the constructive power which holds in the grasp a variety of complex activities and controls their energy, directing it to some conclusive end; but her imagination is strong to conceive a genuine situation, to illustrate it through varied character, to illuminate it with humor and dewy pathos; and as she extends the range of her characters, so she is likely to display even more invention in the choice of situations which shall give opportunity to those delightful characters who spring at her bidding from no one class, and even from no one nation.
—from the Atlantic Monthly ( January 1894)
ALICE BROWN
The Country of the Pointed Firs is the flower of a sweet, sane knowledge of life, and an art so elusive that it smiles up at you while you pull aside the petals, vainly probing its heart. The title is exacting, prophetic; a little bit of genius of which the book has to be worthy or come very “tardy off.” And the book is worthy. Here is the idyllic atmosphere of country life, unbroken by one jarring note; even the attendant sadness and pathos of being are resolved into that larger harmony destined to elude our fustian words. It is a book made to defy the praise ordinarily given to details; it must be regarded au large. For it takes hold of the very centre of things. . . . It is the acme of Miss Jewett’s fine achievement, blending the humanity of the “Native of Winby” and the fragrance of the “White Heron.” No such beautiful and perfect work has been done for many years; perhaps no such beautiful work has ever been done in America.
—from the Book Buyer (October 1897)
JULIA R. TUTWILER
Reading The Country of the Pointed Firs is like opening one’s grandmother’s chest of spotless, lavendered linen, or spending a day in a deep forest glade within sight and sound of clear, softly flowing water, the sky blue above the pines and the air shot through and through with Indian summer sunshine.
—from Gunton’s Magazine (November 1903)
HENRY JAMES
To speak in a mere parenthesis of Miss Jewett, mistress of an art of fiction all her own, even though of a minor compass, and surpassed only by Hawthorne as producer of the most finished and penetrating of the numerous ‘short stories’ that have the domestic life of New England for their general and their doubtless somewhat lean subject, is to do myself, I feel, the violence of suppressing a chapter of appreciation that I should long since somewhere have found space for. Her admirable gift, that artistic sensibility in her which rivaled the rare personal, that sense for the finest kind of truthful rendering, the sober and tender note, the temperately touched, whether in the ironic or the pathetic, would have deserved some more pointed commemoration than I judge her beautiful little quantum of achievement, her free and high, yet all so generously subdued character, a sort of elegance of humility or fine flame of modesty, with her remarkably distinguished outward stamp, to have called forth before the premature and overdarkened close of her young course of production.
—from the Atlantic Monthly ( July 1915)
EDWARD GARNETT
By what special excellence, the curious reader will ask, is the province of Miss Jewett’s art marked out as a country set apart from its neighbours? By a peculiar spirituality which her work exhales, a spirituality which is inseparable from her unerring perception of her country-people’s native outlook and instinctive attitude of life. It is by this exquisite spiritual gravity interpenetrating with the finest sense of humour, intensely, even maliciously discriminating, that Miss Jewett seems to speak for the feminine soul of the New England race. . . .
I have spoken of Miss Jewett’s art as coming second only to Hawthorne’s in its spiritual interpretation of the New England character. In originality of vision, and in intense and passionate creative force she is, of course, not to be compared with him. The range of her insight is undeniably restricted. Nevertheless, it makes the cosmopolitan appeal, that all art of high quality makes, and her work at its best, no less than Hawthorne’s conveys to us a mysterious sense of her country people’s mental and moral life, seen as a whole in relation to their environment and to their past, and reveals it as the natural growth of the very definite history of the many Puritan generations that have gone before them. In stories such as “Decoration Day,” “The Hilton’s Holiday,” “A Dunnet Shepherdess,” and in scenes in “The Country of the Pointed Firs,” such as “The Bowden Reunion,” and “Shellheap Island,” her art attains to that highest perfection of literature when the fleeting passage of life presented is felt in its invisible relations to immense reaches of life around it, in which, as in an ocean, it blends, merges, and is lost. . . .
Now this rare poetic breath that emanates from Miss Jewett’s homely realism is her artistic reward for caring above all things for the essential spiritual reality of her scenes, and for departing not a hair’s-breadth from its prosaic actualities. A word wrong, a note untrue, the slightest straining after effect, and the natural atmosphere of scene and place would be destroyed, and the whole illusion of the life presented would be shattered.
—from Friday Nights (1922)
MARTHA HALE SHACKFORD
Miss Jewett’s stories are always stories of character. Plots hardly exist in her work; she has little interest in creating suspense or in weaving together threads of varied interests. She presents people through mild desultory action, in situations seldom dramatically striking. The people interpreted live simple, inconspicuous lives, without great tragedy attending them, but made significant through the little things which, by reiterated irritation and pain, tax the spirit of endurance and shape character. The wisdom won from slow pondering of life is found on the lips of her men and women. And these persons speak the very thoughts and the very language of their region; thoughts expressed in a shrewd, picturesque, colloquial fashion, in a dialect directly true to life, not a romantic make-believe. But the best part, perhaps, of her delineation of these people is in her record of their silences. Miss Jewett has interpreted the impulse to reticence, has accounted for the temperament of these watchful, guarded folk who imitate the granite impenetrability of their natural surroundings. Also she has shown the extraordinary sense of justice to be noted in this district. So bound up with nature are these people that they feel accountable for nature’s doings; they must help atone for nature’s ravages and aberrations. But like the ocean’s ebb and flow, the method of giving aid and comfort is somewhat indirect, oblique, attaining its end with the seventh wave.
Miss Jewett’s most successful and probably her most representative work is The Country of the Pointed Firs, a series of chapters linked together loosely enough by the fact that one person records her experiences in a typical Maine village, on the edge of the sea, a village that reaches back to the land overgrown with the spruce trees that, in sharp spires, stand out against the blue sky. It is really a group of character sketches, not a story, and the chief character is Mrs. Todd, a woman with a tragic past, fighting for her daily bread, yet brisk, hopeful, romantic to the last degree. Skilled in the lore of healing herbs, she seems like one of the Fates, endowed with portentous wisdom, stooping to pick sprigs of fragrant pennyroyal, in a sunshiny green pasture. Slowly, and with most delicate humor, Miss Jewett makes clear Mrs. Todd’s endless curiosity, high-mindedness, and shrewd, inexhaustible kindness. . . .
The book is sheer reality both in setting and in character study. The scattered bits of description give one the very look of green pastures, the scent of aromatic herbs, the f
ragrance of sun-smitten spruce trees, the sting of the cool salt air, and the milder aspects of blue, sunshiny, safe harbors.
—from Sewanee Review ( January 1922)
WILLA CATHER
If I were asked to name three American books which have the possibility of a long, long life, I would say at once, The Scarlet Letter, Huckleberry Finn, and The Country of the Pointed Firs. I can think of no others that confront time and change so serenely.
—from her preface to The Best Stories
of Sarah Orne Jewett (1925)
Questions
1. Why should a New Yorker, say, or a Houstonian or a Londoner care about Sarah Orne Jewett’s fiction? Does it transcend its color ful local setting?
2. From the fiction in this edition, what do you think is Sarah Orne Jewett’s attitude toward men? Is she simply not interested in men? Or is she against them for some reason?
3. What traits held in common by the denizens of Dunnet Landing separate them from other people, Americans or otherwise? How is Dunnet Landing’s “group” different from any other?
4. Would you like to have lived in Dunnet Landing? Why, or why not?
FOR FURTHER READING
Letters
Cary, Richard, ed. Sarah Orne Jewett Letters. Enlarged and revised edition. Waterville, ME: Colby College Press, 1967.
Fields, Annie, ed. Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911.
Biographies
Blanchard, Paula. Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and Her Work. Radcliffe Biography Series. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994.
The Country of the Pointed Firs and Selected Short Fiction Page 44