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

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

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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.”