Diary: Rachel Cohen, A Chance Meeting: Sarah Orne Jewett

Mar 15, 2024

In our conversation last Sunday with Chris Benfey and Ben Taylor, there was hearty agreement that Sarah Orne Jewett’s 1896 novel The Country of the Pointed Firs had been an important precedent for Willa Cather. I stumbled just after on this account of a visit of Sarah Orne Jewett and her companion Annie Adams Fields to the country house of Henry James, from Rachel Cohen’s interwoven group portrait of meetings of American artists and artists from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. Her account is drawn from autobiographies, drafts, notebooks, diaries, novels, letters, poems, and photographs, and is only imagined where she says so. —AKj

Sarah Orne Jewett had begun her career at the Atlantic Monthly by sending drafts of stories first to James Fields and then to William Dean Howells, who sent back, as was his way, tactful, patient, brilliant letters of advice and appreciation. Jewett gradually found her own right material in the people and landscape of Maine. Her stories and sketches emerged out of the farms and fishing villages near South Berwick, where she grew up and resided, on and off, throughout her adult life. Jewett was always interested in the ways that people, especially women, lived in places. She was one of the first American authors to write of women characters whose stories did not end with their decision to marry. Jewett published nineteen books in her life and, unusual for a woman at the time, made her living writing. Her novel The Country of the Pointed Firs was serialized in four issues of the Atlantic Monthly in 1896 and then published as a book. Jewett received a torrent of admiring letters, including one from William James, who was a friend of hers, and another from Rudyard Kipling: “It’s immense—it is the very life … the reallest [sic] New England book ever given us.” Kipling added a postscript, “I don’t believe even you know how good that book is.”

Some fifteen years before the publication of The Country of the Pointed Firs, around the time of James Fields’s death, Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett had become friends and, as time went on, companions. Intimate relationships between women were then common enough in their city to be referred to even elsewhere as “Boston marriages.” Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett, who was about fifteen years Fields’s junior, lived together at 148 Charles Street and in New Hampshire, where the Fieldses had a summer house, and, more rarely, in South Berwick. They were often separated for long periods, as Fields’s work was in Boston and Jewett was very close to her family who were in Maine. They made four lengthy trips to Europe together: they went to Greece and Italy, to France and England and Scotland, and in 1898, on the third such journey, feeling keenly that they had not seen Henry James since the death of his sister Alice, they made a point of going to visit James at his new house in Rye.

After lunch, James, not quite sure what to do with his guests, wondered if they would like to take a carriage ride along the coast to Winchelsea, where they might look in at the cottage of the great actress Ellen Terry, and then they might go on to the nearby town of Hastings, reputed to have a nice view of the sea. It was a happy suggestion—neither Annie Adams Fields nor Sarah Orne Jewett ever tired of looking at the sea—and in short order they were in a carriage. If the state of the world had not yet arisen in their conversation, by the ride it would have. In 1898, the later stages of the “affaire Dreyfus” were raging in France, and James was following it with great absorption, every day in the papers. James was a Dreyfusard, believing that Alfred Dreyfus had been unjustly accused of espionage because of his Jewish background. Emile Zola, Dreyfus’s greatest public defendant, had, in January of that year, published “J’accuse” on Dreyfus’s behalf. James later showed a casual anti-Semitism in The American Scene, but his lifelong allegiance to the French realists held firm in this instance. The three writers must have talked, too, of the war with Spain; the Maine had exploded in Havana that February, and the United States was in the midst of a war through which it would take Puerto Rico and Guam. All this was much to the dismay of Mark Twain, William James, and William Dean Howells, who thought the American reaction “wickedly wrong.” Later, Twain and William James would all join the American Anti-Imperialist League and act publicly to protest one of the outcomes of the war, American expansionism in the Philippines, where, William James wrote, “we are now simply pirates.” Fields and Jewett were very worried about the situation and wrote letters home hoping for peace.

On their small journey that day, James brought along his little dog, which, according to English law, he was supposed to muzzle. But he didn’t like the muzzle, he thought it cruel to the dog, and, as they talked, he kept putting it on and taking it off and somehow contrived to lose it, but then felt responsible and didn’t want to return without the muzzle, and so, when they arrived in Hastings, though they looked briefly at the seascape, which turned out not to be terribly fine after all, they spent the rest of the afternoon in the shops of the village, looking for a new muzzle. Then they drank tea and consumed a great many cakes. (James claimed to have eaten ten.) It was a pleasant and companionable afternoon, and at its end they parted at the Hastings station—Jewett and Fields went to London and James returned to Rye.

Rye was soon to become quite a sociable place. James’s friend Edmund Gosse right away began making regular visits—James and Gosse went bicycle riding together—and a number of other writers later settled in the neighborhood: Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, Stephen Crane, and Ford Madox Ford. They influenced one another’s work: James had already sent Conrad’s work to Howells; James wanted to collaborate with Wells; and a line in James’s The Other House was a direct inspiration for the opening of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier. They put on amateur theatricals in one another’s houses and kept one another company in the winter. But when Fields and Jewett came to visit James that first September, the social circle was not yet so rich. He had been very glad to see them.

Annie Adams Fields was always delightful. In remembrance of her husband, and also out of her political conviction that it was not right to dress luxuriously when people were hungry, she always wore a long black mourning veil and a lavender widow’s dress, but, as James said of her, “all her implications were gay.” Sarah Orne Jewett was vivacious, amusing, and amused. He could see why people felt that the arrival of Jewett had made a fine change in Fields’s life. It was interesting that Jewett’s stories had a hint of sadness in them that wasn’t in her conversation. In person, James found her quite childlike. It had been her birthday the week before the visit, and she had turned forty-nine; James would have enjoyed knowing that on her birthday the previous year Jewett had written to a friend, “This is my birthday and I am always nine years old.”

It was perhaps not only their ebullience and pleasure in each other’s company but also the sense that the two women had their place that was encouraging and cheering to James, newly started on a difficult path. The early and middle 1890s had been excruciating for him. His dear sister Alice had been living near him in England with her companion in her own Boston marriage, Katherine Loring. James was not entirely pleased to share his sister, and the portrait he drew of a similar sort of relationship between Olive Chancellor and Verena Tarrant in his novel The Bostonians could have seemed to Alice James rather critical, but by and large the three of them had been glad in one another’s company for almost eight years. Toward the end of that time, Alice James developed cancer, from which she died in 1892. “The loss is absolute …,” wrote Henry James. “It makes a great difference in my life—but I must live with the difference as long as I live at all.” Fields and Jewett would have found a quiet moment to mention to Henry that they missed Alice.

Katherine Loring had published, privately, Alice James’s diary, which Henry James recognized as “wondrous,” though it made him excessively anxious, as it referred to many living people by name. He worried that, should it ever reach a wider audience, it would compromise all of their reputations. Years later, perhaps inspired by a similar fear, James wrote a memorial essay on Mr. and Mrs. Fields, in which, with circumlocutory discretion, he referred to Jewett as “an adoptive daughter” to Mrs. Fields. This was not paranoia. James had recently watched in fascinated horror as the Oscar Wilde trial became the talk of London in 1895.

When Fields and Jewett came to visit, James was also recovering from the end of his career as a playwright. He had always, from childhood, been passionate about the stage, and in the early 1890s he had stopped writing novels altogether in order to concentrate on plays. But then, in 1895, after the opening performance of his Guy Domville, a flawed play that had been poorly performed, he walked out onto the stage to take his bow and was booed and hissed by a good part of the audience. The hissing went on for nearly fifteen minutes, during which time James seemed unable to get himself off the stage. In that evening, he experienced “the most horrible hours of my life.” And so he went back to fiction, productively, as always, writing among others: The Other House, What Maisie Knew, The Spoils of Poynton, “The Turn of the Screw,” and the novel upon which he was at work when Fields and Jewett visited, The Awkward Age. The first serial installment of The Awkward Age was to be published on October 1, just two weeks after the visit, and James was well along in the novel then. He probably did not discuss the new book in detail, as he was superstitious about revealing too much while in the process of working. But it was clear to James that certain of his methods and preoccupations were aligning: what he had learned in the theater of staging scenes, the sense of his childhood home, reawakened, in part, by his own new home, and the style he continued to develop—a style both conversational and elaborate—as he now dictated all his work to his typist, William MacAlpine. Henry James liked to have someone to talk to. In this period of James’s work, conversations painfully sought meaning and fell just shy of it, and an immense straining was necessary to get at the most ephemeral nuances.

Rachel Cohen is the author of Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels, Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade, and A Chance Meeting: American Encounters, reissued this month by NYRB classics, from which this post is drawn.

The book shares a title with Willa Cather’s 1936 essay, “A Chance Meeting,” describing an encounter with Gustav Flaubert’s niece at a hotel in Provence. In chapters after this one Rachel Cohen introduces Willa Cather, recounting her attendance, at his invitation, at the seventieth birthday party of Mark Twain and her period of friendship with Sarah Orne Jewett and Annie Adams Fields, of whom she writes, “Cather seems to have known right away that these were people she wanted and needed to know.” Rachel Cohen writes of her project invoking the interconnected lives of these thirty writers and artists that she is “pursuing the effects of presence.”

Did you miss the concluding virtual conversation to our My Àntonia reading group with Chris Benfey and Ben Taylor last Sunday? You can watch it here.

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