Its the birthday of short-story writer Sarah Orne Jewett (books by this author), born in South Berwick, Maine (1849). Her family had been living in Maine for generations, making a good living as shipbuilders and seafarers. She was often sick as a child, and her physician father felt that the best medicine for her was to be outside in the fresh air. Instead of attending school, she accompanied him on his rounds, traveling between homes in rural Maine. She met all sorts of people, and the conversations inspired her writing. She published a short story in The Atlantic Monthly when she was 19 years old, and spent the rest of her career as a writer. For a few months of each year, usually in the winter, she lived with her companion Annie Fields in Boston. This type of romantic friendship and living arrangement was known as a Boston marriage. During the winters, Jewett and Fields enjoyed a lively social life on Charles Street in Boston — reading to each other, going out in society, and running a famous literary salon, entertaining guests from Henry James to Willa Cather. During the rest of the year, Jewett lived in Maine, in the beautiful old house where she had grown up. It was filled with dark mahogany wood, elegant furniture, and curios from all over the world, many of them brought by her seafaring ancestors. She did her best writing at home in Maine, upstairs in a room with books, pictures, fresh flowers from her garden, and a writing desk in front of a big window looking down at the trees. She tried to write five pages a day, although she seldom achieved that. She wrote in a letter: I get almost no time for my writing and that is a sorrow. I amused Mary very much this morning while we were driving together by saying a certain apple-tree in a field was just like me. It hadnt been pruned and was a wilderness of suckers and unprofitable little scraggly branches — I said; I wish I grew in three or four smooth useful branches instead of starting out here, there and everywhere, and doing nothing of any account at any point. [...] Its hard for me to know what to do: I dont like to shut myself up half of every day and say nobody must interfere with me, when there are dozens of things that I might do. Sometimes, though, she was struck so strongly by an idea that she was able to write an entire story in one sitting and barely alter it before sending it off to the publisher. When she wasnt writing, she loved to work in her garden, ride her horses, go for long walks, or take her boat out on the river. Willa Cather wrote of her: There was an ease, a graciousness, a light touch in conversation, a delicate unobtrusive wit. You quickly recognized that her gift with the pen was one of many charming personal attributes. [...] She had never been one of those who live to write. She lived for a great many things, and the stories by which we know her were one of many preoccupations. Jewett wrote to a friend: Sometimes, the business part of writing grows very noxious to me, and I wonder if in heaven our best thoughts — poets thoughts, especially — will not be flowers, somehow, or some sort of beautiful live things that stand about and grow, and dont have to be chaffered over and bought and sold. She wrote 20 books, including A White Heron and Other Stories (1886), Strangers and Wayfarers (1890), and The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896). She said, You must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that.
Posted on: Wed, 03 Sep 2014 17:34:20 +0000
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