Memories of the Jewett Family
from Gladys Hasty Carroll, Dunnybrook, New York:
MacMillan, 1943.
Dunnybrook is Carroll's
reconstruction of the history of her family in York County,
Maine. Readers of Sarah Orne Jewett will be particularly
interested in the pictures Carroll presents of three Jewetts,
Sarah, her father, and her sister, Mary.
Dr. Jewett at a childbirth
Dunnybrook, pp. 296-298
From
time to time George came into the room, treading as easy as he
could, his eyes somber, his mouth grim, and sat down by the
bed. There was nothing he could do. There was nothing anyone
could do. But he could sit there. He thought of that ether cup
he had once held for Hattie. He wished he had such a cup for
Sarah Jane. But when he mentioned it to Dr. Jewett, the doctor
shook his head.
"Not
yet, son," he said. "Not at all if we can help it. Nature's
way is best. You know that, George. Be patient. It will pass."
So.
It would pass. But when?
Nobody
knew.
When
George was there, Lydia could go out into the kitchen, where
the doctor sat, and pour him a cup of tea. She could see he
needed it. He was getting to be an old man now. He must be
eased when he could. They must all try to spare him. What
would Dunnybrook do without him? This kindly-eyed,
long-fingered, gentle-speaking man who had read all books, and
knew all people, and counted all he knew his friend . . . .
"Here.
Down this cup before you go in there again," said Lydia,
putting it before him. " 'Twill strengthen you."
"You
down one, too," he said. "You need extra strength, too, Mrs.
Brown. For afterward. When I've gone home to bed, and mother
and babe are sleeping sweetly, you'll still be up and about,
hovering over, well I know . . . . Pour a good cup for
yourself."
She
poured it, but she could not drink it. She lifted the cup and
slowly put it down again, smiling faintly.
Drinking
deep, he smiled back; and Lydia knew her daughter had the best
of care. She did not know -- or, if she did, it did not matter
to her -- that he was a Professor of Obstetrics at Bowdoin
College, that he was President of the Maine Medical Society,
and that his contributions to scientific journals were
numerous and notable. She only knew that, for a doctor,
Dunnybrook had the best there was; and that if God was willing
Sarah Jane should ever smile again, Dr. Jewett would see she
did . . . .
"You
mothers!" he teased her gently. "You go down into the Valley
to bear your children, and for every Valley they go into, in
their turn, you go again!"
"Oh,
deeper," Lydia said brokenly. "Far deeper, Doctor. It is so
much easier to go alone -- "
"Yes,"
he said. "So it is you, and not Sarah, who suffers most today.
She can't realize that now, but she will. And you can.
Hard as this is, other times, by and by, will be harder. She
has to learn. She has to practice. She must grow strong . . .
. I have a daughter Sarah, too."
"I
know you have. She rides with you sometimes. I see her settin'
in your carriage, before houses where you have been called.
She is a sweet-pretty little thing. My boys said she used to
come over to the stable, when they worked there, and pet the
horses. I mind they said she thought folks loaded stable
carriages too heavy, oftentimes; and she couldn't abide to see
a tight checkrein --"
"Yes.
That's Sarah. She loves horses. She loves everything. She's a
bundle of love . . . . But she isn't very little any longer.
She was seventeen last week. She doesn't ride with me as much
as she used to. She rides alone more. She's got a little horse
she calls Sheila because she shies sometimes, maybe because
Sarah leaves the reins too loose . . . . My Sarah has much
still to learn, like yours. I only hope, like you, she isn't
hurt too much, doesn't have to pay too dear for her learning .
. . . I've got two other daughters, too: Mary and Caroline.
But I can whisper to you, Mrs. Brown, that, in some way, Sarah
--"
No,
even here, even to her, he could not put it into words. He did
not need to.
"I
have other children left to me, too," said Lydia, low. "But,
some way, Sarah --"
George
came to the door.
"I
guess she needs you, Doctor."
"Not
just yet," Dr. Jewett answered quietly. "Soon, I think, but
not just yet. Go back with her, George. She needs you now.
She'll need me a little later."
George
went back.
Dr.
Jewett said, moving a teaspoon in his empty cup, "Sarah is a
good name. My Sarah is named for my mother, Sarah Orne of
Portsmouth. She died when she was twenty-five. . . . "
"My
Sarah is Sarah Jane," said Lydia Brown. "The Jane is for my
mother. The Sarah is for my little sister Sarey. She died
before she was twenty . . . .
The
old doctor stood up. He stopped beside Lydia's chair and took
her hand and drew her up beside him.
"Our
Sarahs," he promised her, "will live longer. And better.
They're the new generation . . . . Come now."
They
went into the bedroom.
The
doctor touched Sarah Jane's damp and tumbled chestnut hair.
"Poor
child," he said. "Brave little woman. I think you've done your
part. We'll have this baby now."
She
groped for George's hand and felt it close over hers, strong
as an oak root, steady and warm as a sunny ledge.
"George
-- will you care -- if it's a little girl?"
"Care?
No . . . . Why should I care? All I want is for it to be here,
whatever 'tis, and leave you be!"
"That's
-- good," said Sarah Jane. "I jest -- couldn't -- bear it --
if you wa'n't pleased, George -- "
How
had she known?
It
came, a little girl.
Sarah
Jane slept. The doctor went home. George slept. Lydia washed,
and dressed, and sat and held the baby . . . tiptoed in and
out with the baby in her arms . . . hovered . . .
Note
Sheila: Jewett did not buy her own
horse, Sheila, until after the publication of Deephaven
in 1877, her 28th year.
On the American Revolution, connections with Jewett's The
Tory Lover (1901)
Dunnybrook, pp. 301-303.
Down
on Witchtrot Road, Cap'n Andrew Goodwin built a river freight
boat, a gundalow, in his dooryard, and sixty yoke of oxen
hauled it to launching at the head of tidewater in the
Piscataqua. This point of the river was seven miles from
Witchtrot and known as the Lower Landing in Oldfields. It was
near the burying ground where lay the bones of that Mrs.
Mehitable Goodwin who was carried away to Canada by Indians
and made wife to a Frenchman named Riand, and bore him sons,
but was at last brought home again by her Berwick husband, to
live and die a Berwick heroine. It was near the site of the
old Lord Garrison, where John Marr's grandmother, Sarah Lord,
was born; near Cow Cove, where the first cattle ever brought
to Maine and New Hampshire, a fine herd from Denmark, had been
landed, and which the farm of James Warren the First (in
America) had fronted . . . .
Cap'n
Andrew's gundalow slid into the river from the land of his
cousin Alpheus Goodwin, and Nancy watched the launching with
other Goodwins from the front door of their house -- a house
as white, with as many broad chimneys, as any in Portsmouth; a
house built during the Revolutionary War by Colonel Jonathan
Hamilton (at the same time Bial Hamilton was building his
mansion to overshadow the Dunny Brook); the house where John
Paul Jones visited before setting out downriver to take The
Ranger into battle for his country under a silken flag
cut from the best gowns of Portsmouth belles; the house in
which lovely Mary Hamilton danced that last night with
handsome young loyalist Roger Wallingford and persuaded him to
serve with John Paul Jones, a service in which he was to lose
his life . . . .
Mr.
John Marr was to write many years later, at the request of
Portsmouth Daughters of the Revolution:
My
grandfather, Thomas Marr, born in 1763 in a house built by his
father, Surples Marr, and still standing in South Berwick,
often told me of John Paul Jones, The Ranger, and its
crew. When Grandfather was fourteen years old, he saw The
Ranger ready to sail out of Portsmouth Harbor. He had
gone from his home to see the sailing. Its crew was mostly
Berwick and Kittery men. He said there was a "marster" big
crowd on the wharf when the flag was presented, and when young
Wallingford bent it to the halyard and shook out the silk
folds to the breeze, a mighty shout went up, "I tell you." But
all at once it stopped, for the halyards had fouled and the
colors stood at half-mast, until a sailor went aloft and freed
them. My grandfather used to say, "I thought as poor young
Wallingford stood there looking up at the colors that it
seemed a sure fore-runner of his death, and sure enough it
was, for of the two men killed on The Ranger in her
fight with The Drake, young Wallingford was the
first." . . .
And
Dr. Jewett's Sarah was to write in a book published in 1901
and called The Tory Lover:
Gideon
Warren, a Berwick sailor of the old stock, had known
Lieutenant Wallingford from a child, and had himself been born
and reared by the river.
"Tis
Mr. Roger Wallingford," he cried in the depths of the Old Mill
Prison in Plymouth, England. "Don't you think I've got sense
enough to know? And he's a dying man!"
Warren,
a heavily-built, kind-faced old mariner, had fallen on his
knees and taken the sick head on his shoulder with all the
gentleness of a woman.
"Get
him some water, can't ye?" demanded Warren. "Lord! I hope he
ain't a-going to die before he tells some news of the old
Lower Landing and how things were going forward when he left
home, all up along Witchtrot way."
"I'm
all right now," said Wallingford, and then he saw whose stout
arms were holding him. "Jehovah! We had news at home long ago
that you were dead, Warren!"
"Well,
I hain't then, so now!" cried honest Gideon indignantly, which
amused the prisoners so they fell to laughing. "Well, I
hain't," Warren insisted. "Now tell us where you come from and
how long you are from Berwick. We get no sort of news here. I
expect you can't tell me whether my old mother's living?"
The
poor man tried hard to master his feelings but his face began
to twitch and he burst out crying like a child . . . .
I
do not take these lines direct from Sarah Orne Jewett's The
Tory Lover. I requote them from a booklet
into which are pasted the clippings of a little "History of
Berwick Town" written for the local paper, the South Berwick Independent,
in 1911, two years after Miss Jewett's death. The "History" is
modestly signed, at the end, "V. V. H."
Vinnie
Hasty . . . Miss Vinnie . . . Little Lady. . . . And for her
too, now, there is a stone which says she has been dead for
more than twenty years.
But
what are stones? And what is time? In Dunnybrook we play on
time as on a fiddle's strings.
Nobody
dies, who is remembered.
Notes
Hetty Goodwin: Jewett retells or alludes to the
captivity of Mehitable Goodwin many times in her works, notably
in
Betty Leicester (1890), "The Old Town of Berwick"
(1894), and
The Tory Lover (1901). Though oral
tradition told of Hetty's remarriage during captivity, research
by Jewett's friends, C. Alice Baker and Emma Lewis Coleman,
failed to find any evidence that Hetty remarried during her 5
years in Canada. See notes to "
The Old Town of Berwick."
Hamilton house: The Hamilton
house was not built until 1785-87, after the American
Revolution. As a result, John Paul Jones could not have
visited the house in 1777 as he does in Jewett's novel, The
Tory Lover. Carroll has transformed fiction into
history, or accepted another piece of fiction into her
fictionalized reconstruction of local and family history.
Dr. Jewett at another childbirth
Dunnybrook, pp. 305-6
Sarah
Jane bore her first child in September of '66, her second in
June of '69. And Lydia came and stood by a second time, and
poured tea for Dr. Jewett in a new, bright ell-kitchen where
windows looked both north and south.
"I
shall have just time for this, I think," he told her
cheerfully. "She will not keep us waiting long today. Your
Sarah is doing very well."
Lydia's
mind went back to that other night. She sat with little Vinnie
on her lap, resting her chin on the top of Vinnie's round,
dark little head, and smiled.
"How
is your Sarah doing, Doctor?"
"Mine?"
he repeated.
"Seems
she don't ride out this way as much, lately, as she did. Folks
she used to call on, up and down the road, say they miss their
visits with the doctor's girl. They say she must have outgrown
her taste for gingerbread."
"No,
not at all." He put down the empty cup and took out a fine
handkerchief to touch his lips, for Lydia had not known just
where Sarah Jane kept napkins. "It isn't that," said Sarah
Orne's father. "And she loves her friends as dearly as ever,
none dearer than the folks who live out along this road. She
wants to come. But -- my Sarah is a strange little creature.
Do you know what she's doing these days? Would you venture a
guess -- just to see how wrong a good guess can be?"
Lydia
shook her head, her eyes on his face. What would a doctor's
daughter do? With no bread to bake, no floor to scrub, no
brass to polish, what did a girl do all day, day after day?
Play a piano? Sing? Embroider?
"It's
a great secret," Dr. Jewett said. "You mustn't breathe a word.
But my Sarah is a funny child. She wouldn't do what the other
children did. And now she's growing up, she won't do what the
other girls do . . . . No, my Sarah goes into her room, and
shuts the door, and sits there alone, and -- writes!"
"My
sakes alive," gasped Lydia. "Whatever does she write? Little
notes? Or -- verses?"
"No.
My Sarah," the doctor said indulgently, but with quiet pride,
"an' please you, ma'am, my Sarah writes stories. And sends
them to magazines. And they are published. Only yesterday she
had word from a gentleman named William Dean Howells, who is
an editor, that a story of hers will appear soon in the Atlantic
Monthly!"
Even
Lydia Brown knew the Atlantic Monthly. She never read
it; but John sometimes brought a copy home from town and it
lay for months, after he had read it, on the kitchen shelf
with the Town Report and the Almanac, to be, like them,
handled with due respect and dusted properly around.
"My
sakes alive," gasped Lydia again. She had never heard of such
a thing. She held Vinnie so tight that the child squirmed.
"Why, I thought only great ones wrote in that. Whatever do
folks say, about the village?"
"We
don't know," the doctor admitted. "They don't say anything to
us about it because they don't know it's Sarah, yet. You see,
she uses an assumed name. She calls herself Alice Eliot.
Nobody knows it's Sarah. It's her secret, mind, and you must
never tell."
"I
won't," Lydia promised. "But ain't you anxious over her,
tryin' to carry such a weight as that? She always seemed a
pindlin' little thing to me, what I've seen of her -- "
"I
am," the doctor said gravely. "I am anxious. But parents are
always anxious. You know that, Mrs. Brown. If it's not one
thing, it's another. But mostly they come through very well
with all they undertake to carry. Don't they? We need more
faith . . . . I must go in now to your Sarah."
Atlantic: Jewett's first
story to appear in The Atlantic was "Mr. Bruce," which
was published in December, 1869 under the name of A. C. Eliot.
The Hasty family reads Deephaven
Dunnybrook, pp. 310-313
In
'72 Lydia's Sarah Jane was the mother of three children; and
the doctor's Sarah Orne was seeing her second story in the
pages of the Atlantic, and writing in a letter:
"I don't like to shut myself up half the day and say nobody
must interfere with me, when there are dozens of things I
might do. . . . I'm afraid of being selfish and shirking
-- and yet . . ."
In
'78 Sarah Orne Jewett published her first book, Deephaven,
under her own name, with the inscription, "I dedicate this
story of out-of-door life and country people first to my
father and mother, my two best friends, and also to all my
other friends, whose names I say to myself lovingly, though I
do not write them here." She had a letter saying, "I know of
nothing better in our literature," and signed "John Greenleaf
Whittier." She was among the guests invited to Oliver Wendell
Holmes' seventieth birthday party.
Sarah
Jane Hasty's mother and father had come now to make their home
with her. John Brown had grown too feeble to take care of even
one cow and one horse, or to make the occasional necessary
trip to town. Sarah Jane worried about her mother being
alone with him over in the woods. She had spoken to George
about it, and George had said, "They better come over here
with us." So here they were now, filling up Sarah Jane's
little white house almost to overflowing with old and young,
sickness and health, playing and talking and cooking and
sweeping, hunger and laughter and pain. . . .
Long
evenings that winter Sarah Jane read Deephaven aloud
while George snored in the bedroom, Vinnie and Hattie slept on
the trundle bed -- the same one on which Georgie and Say Jane
had once slept, and Joe and Little Columby in their turn --
drawn out into the sitting room, and the boy, Warren, curled
into a ball like a puppy on a feather tick stretched on the
floor of the sitting room cupboard . . . . But John Brown was
wide-awake, smoking his pipe, and Lydia's knitting needles
flew while their Sarah read aloud, by the lamp, with a warm
fire crackling in her cookstove, and the kettle on for their
nightcap cups of tea . . . .
"I
s'pose it's York she's gettin' at, don't you?" asked Lydia.
"More
likely Wells," said John.
"It's
real good anyway," said Sarah Jane. "Only does seem as if
there's too much dyin' in it, what ain't already dead. You get
the feelin' she's always sayin' good-by to everything quick as
she says hello. I keep wishin' she'd look ahead a little mite
instead of always behind."
"Anybody
has to look the way their mind turns, I s'pose," commented
Lydia.
"Well,
I don't," snapped Sarah Jane. "If my mind don't turn as I want
it to, I take aholt and shift it . . . . Seems as though,
accordin' to this, when she rides along a road she's always
pickin' out an old deserted house to stop at and mourn over.
Now ain't that contrary? Anybody else I ever heard of would
stop where folks was!"
"She
likes folks as they used to be," sighed Lydia. "And they was
awful dear, and good!"
"They
was just like us," Sarah Jane declared, "only they lived a
different time. I wish, too, they was all right here, speakin'
with us. But I wouldn't swap the young ones for 'em. Now,
would you?"
What
could John and Lydia answer? Give up Warren, even to have
Little Columby back? Give up Vinnie, in exchange for Sarey?
Give up Hattie, for Georgiana?
"It's
the doctor's girl that wrote this book, not us," said John.
"Let her have her say. Read on."
And
Sarah Jane read on to the end:
Before we left the leaves had fallen off all the trees
except the oaks, which make in cold weather one of the
dreariest sounds one ever hears . . . . The houses were shut
up as close as possible and the old sailors did not seem
cheery any longer . . . . In the front yards we saw the
flower-beds black with frost, except a few brave pansies,
which had kept green and had bloomed under the china aster-
stocks, and one day we picked some of these little flowers
to put between the leaves of a book and take away with us .
. . .
"Sounds
for all the world like Mr. Marr," observed Sarah Jane, who had
heard from Aunt Sarah Warren many times of his twilight visit
with Aaron's Lizy. "I guess they're six and a half-a-dozen."
"And
both in good company," said Lydia gently.
"Read
on," said John Brown.
I
think we loved Deephaven all the more in those last days,
with a bit of compassion in our tenderness for the dear old
town which had so little to amuse it . . . . By and by the
Deephaven warehouses will fall and be used for firewood, and
the wharves will be worn away by the tides. The few old
gentlefolks who still linger will be dead then; and 1 wonder
if some day I will go down to Deephaven for the sake of old
times, and read the epitaphs in the burying-ground . . . .
"There,
you see!" Sarah Jane concluded. "She thought that when she
left York, or Wells, or wherever 'twas, the place would give
itself a funeral. But I should doubt if it did. I never heard
so. I like 'em both a sight better in the late fall, if I ride
down with George when he goes clammin', or early spring, when
he's after elwives, than I do summertimes. They ain't all
cluttered up with folks that don't belong . . . . Still, I
will say, some way, she made a real nice story of it."
And
she put the little brown book with the sheaf of wheat in gilt
on the front cover very carefully into the hanging shelves
above the lounge, saying that there the children could not
reach it. Though she granted that some day, when the younger
ones were napping, Vinnie might take it down, after she had
washed her hands. Print had a kind of fascination for Vinnie;
that child could already make out a surprising number of big
words.
"One
thing," thought Lydia, in pity, "does seem as if the doctor's
Sarah never comes nigh to a child, whereverabout she goes . .
. . And a child is
such a sight of comfort!"
Shut myself up: This quotation
is from a letter to Theophilus Parsons, dated 25 October 1874.
Jewett's second Atlantic story:
"The Shore House" appeared in September 1873.
never comes nigh to a child:
The Hastys seem unaware that Jewett had been publishing a good
deal of children's fiction and verse in the years through
1877, when Deephaven was published.
Carroll evaluates Jewett's Literary Career
Dunnybrook, 338-42
Something had gone wrong with the brown
eyes Johnny Marr so loved. Lizy wore a dark green shade over
them now. She put her hands a little before her when she moved
about. She could not read the books with which the shelves of
the Jellison house were crowded, but Emily read aloud to her
nights after the work was done; often when Emily put down
their book and helped Sister Lizy to bed, roosters were
already crowing and there was a pale streak across the dark
sky above the mountain . . . . And every second or third
summer Mr. John Marr came home from New York, bringing more
books. Sister Emily and Emily's little daughter, May, called
him Uncle John. His visits were summer Christmases. He would
drive up in a stable carriage, get out, laden with parcels,
and walk eagerly up to the low door -- tail-coated,
silk-hatted old Mr. Marr. . . .
Warren
Hasty once watched one of these visits through a spyglass lent
to him by a Mrs. Elwell who lived next to Jellisons', and on
whom Sarah Jane was paying a call. Mrs. Elwell knew how to
keep a small boy quiet while his elders talked. She brought
out her "glass" and showed Warren how to adjust it to his
young eyes, and rest it on the window sill, and kneel below .
. . and bring himself as close to Mr. Marr as if he, too, were
there in the Jellison yard, where an elegant gentleman walked
side by side with Lizy Neal in the old garden, his hand under
her elbow . . . . But even the spyglass did not tell what Mr.
John Marr said to Lizy, nor how she answered him . . . .
In
the morning, before he went to Lizy, John Marr had always sat
under the maples by the Warren cabin and talked long with
Columby. As they grew older, and Mr. Marr's visits were more
regular, they approached each other always more nearly and
more freely. Here was such a man as John Marr had never found
anywhere else, such a friend as he did not have out in New
York . . . .
And
late in the afternoon, after he left Lizy, he always stopped
in the village to call on the doctor's Sarah. She was Sarah
Orne Jewett now, an established and deeply respected writer,
not only throughout her own country, but abroad as well.
A few years after Deephaven she had published a
collection of stories called Country By-ways and
dedicated it "To my dear father; my dear friend; the best and
wisest man I ever knew."
She
spent most of her winters in Boston, visited the Thomas Bailey
Aldriches and Whittier, knew Matthew Arnold and Lowell well;
went often to the Isle of Shoals to stay with Celia Thaxter;
exchanged many sisterly notes with Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.
William Dean Howells said, "How you do make other people's
joinery seem crude and clumsy!" John Burroughs wrote, "I know
you are from Maine. I can taste the flavor of the birches in
your books. May the birches be kind to you." She traveled
extensively abroad, visiting Tennyson, Christina Rossetti,
Henry James . . . .
But
to Berwick she always returned, in her thoughts and in her
books -- the Berwick of her childhood and of still earlier
days. If ever Berwick seemed to her a stranger, she went then
to Exeter -- where her mother's family, the Perrys, still
lived and where, as she once wrote to Sara Norton of Salmon
Falls, "I always find my childhood going on as if I had never
grown up at all, with my grand-aunts and their old horses and
their elm trees and their unbroken china plates and big jars
by the fireplaces. And I go by the house where I went to
school, aged eight, in a summer that I spent with my
grandmother, and feel as if I could go and play in the sandy
garden with little dry bits of elm-twigs stuck in painstaking
rows. There are electric cars in Exeter now, but they can't
make the least difference to me." Her memories were sweet and
secure. In a much later note she wrote joyously to the same
Sara Norton, "This is my birthday and I am always nine years
old."
How
could such a writer but have John Marr as an admiring and
understanding reader, such a woman lack him as a devoted
friend?
Sarah
Orne Jewett published A Country Doctor in 1884, A
White Heron in 1886; other collections of short stories
and sketches; and then suddenly surpassed all she had
previously done in a full-length volume, The Country of
the Pointed Firs . . . . William James wrote her,
"I can't hold in from telling you what exquisite pleasure it
has given me." Kipling said, "It's immense. It is the very
life."
Julia
Ward Howe and her daughter Laura E. Richards became frequent
guests at the Jewett house. With Sarah they visited the
charming village shops, the old Latin Academy on the hilltop,
the Congregational Church at the foot of Academy Street; Miss
Elisabeth Cushing, whose father had been a Boston Cushing and
come to Berwick in 1795 -- when Berwick, "though small, was as
proper a place to live as Boston" -- and whose mother had been
hostess to Lafayette; the Nortons and the Does and the
Burleighs and the Wards and the Goodwins and Kate Sanborn, the
doctor's daughter . . . . Mrs. Howe and Sarah Orne Jewett were
the only two women on the crowded platform at the celebration
of the Longfellow Centennial.
Bowdoin
awarded Sarah Orne Jewett the first Doctor of Letters degree
it ever bestowed on a woman. She met and befriended Willa
Cather, who was much later to write, "If I were asked to name
three American books which have the possibility of a long
life, I should 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."
. . .
Honors
which many long for were hers without stint; and she was
grateful, and in a way happy. Yet in her heart, as in her
books, she was forever returning to the life of her childhood
and to an earlier life which, even then, she had been looking
back upon with intimacy and longing. It hurt her for any tree
which she had known to fall; she did not feel that it could
ever be replaced. She haunted old buildings, old roads; she
cherished old friends and was inconsolable at their loss. She
told Willa Cather that her head was full of old houses and old
women. She yearned to relive the hours she had spent with her
father among his back-country patients, though with him had
gone the key which would have opened any farmhouse door.
She
was touched to the quick when a wrinkled old lady, bundled in
rusty bonnet and shawl, hugging butter boxes, peered at her in
the midst of Saturday marketing and asked,[.] "Now just which
one of the doctor's girls be you, dear?" No letter from James,
Lowell, Howells, or any other fellow writer brought her the
glow which came in reading a brief note from Hattie
Chadbourne: "Your father was our doctor when we lived on York
Road and every time he appeared to us there it was a blessing.
Your books, I feel, bring the same sweet solace to all about
the world who read them. Your father would be deeply proud if
he could know how you carry on his great and rare work in
fields broader than are open to one in his profession . . . .
I believe your Mrs. Todd of "The Country of the Pointed Firs"
to be my dear old neighbor, Mrs. Joanna Hasty of York Road." .
. .
As
a child, Sarah Jewett told John Marr, she had used to love to
run up Portland Street to meet the wood sleds of the farmers
coming down from Dunnybrook way, and the first one she met
would stop while she climbed on to ride back; and if she was
lucky she got a few words out of the driver before they
reached the Jewett gate. But now that she was older she could
only watch from the window the wood sleds dragging past; or
the sleighs jingling by on Town Meeting Day with the farmers
looking straight ahead on their way to vote, and their wives
beside them, huddled into shawls, coming to select swatches of
calico for summer dresses they would make up before
house-cleaning time.
"I
don't know them, Mr. Marr," Miss Jewett said wistfully. "I
wish I did. They have kept so many secrets other people have
told and then forgotten. I want to know them as I used to. But
I have lost my interpreter. I have no way now to begin over."
"I
cannot take your father's place," Mr. Marr told her gently,
"but I can help you at least a little. I can show you where to
begin. The next time I go home to Dunnybrook you shall go with
me -- to Columby Warren's and to the Nason Place, where my
Lizy and her Sister Emily live. I will make you known to one
another. And you will go on from there."
The
doctor's Sarah was grateful. She went as often and as far into
Dunnybrook as any villager could go. And she wrote in the
introduction to a new edition of
Deephaven, "In rustic
neighborhoods there will always exist that class of country
people who preserve the best traditions of culture and of
manners, from some divine inborn instinct toward what is
simplest and best and purest, who know the best because they
themselves are kin to it."
John Marr: Jewett corresponded
with John Marr about local history. See his letter to
her about materials in The Tory Lover and other local
historical topics, dated 22 May 1901.
William Dean Howells: His
compliment to Jewett's joinery is quoted in F. O.
Matthiessen's Sarah Orne Jewett, chapter 3.
Burroughs's letter is quoted in the same chapter.
Sara Norton: The quotations
from letters to Norton also appear in Matthiessen.
Always finding her childhood going on is reported in Chapter
2. Always being nine years old appears in Chapter 4.
Kipling and William James:
Their praise for The Country of the Pointed Firs
appears in Matthiessen, Chapter 4.
Doctor's girls: This anecdote
is reported in Chapter 3 of Matthiessen.
Willa Cather: Cather's praise
of Jewett appears in the introduction to her collection, The
Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories (1925).
Wood sleds: Jewett tells this
story in her sketch, "Looking Back on Girlhood" (1892).
New edition of Deephaven:
Jewett's new edition and introduction appeared in 1893.
In 1894, Jewett published her historical sketch, "The Old Town
of Berwick," including with it a picture of Columby Warren's
house, labeled, "One of the oldest houses." The Old
Berwick Historical Society has identified this house, using
photographs of Columby Warren's house owned by Rick Becker.
One of the oldest houses
Columby Warren's house
Carroll remembers Mary Jewett
Dunnybrook, 373-4
Sarah
Orne Jewett once wrote on the occasion of the death of an old
friend, who had been the great lady of her childhood, that she
was sorry for all children yet to be who would never know such
a lady. She did not guess that had she lived long enough for
me to know her she would have filled that same high place,
done that same gracious service for me; nor that, since I was
not to have her, I had, during my village school days, her
sister Mary, and that no lady was ever a greater lady to any
girl than Miss Mary Jewett was to me . . . coming all the way
up steep Academy Hill to stand, round and brisk and kindly, in
soft black silk and swinging gold chain, to tell my French
Club of the France she knew . . . pouring hot chocolate into
tall, transparent cups for a circle of Camp Fire Girls in
fringed gowns and wooden beads, beside her blazing hearth . .
. telling me, as I visited her garden, that the thatched
summerhouse was where Sarah had liked best to write, and
perhaps I would like to go there by myself and sit a little
while . . . .
Sarah
Orne Jewett had her Miss Cushing. I had my Miss Mary.
My
neighbor had his Columby Warren.
He
does not know what my son Warren said the other day when
someone asked him which he admired most of all the men in many
walks of life, whom he knows, family not counting.
He
answered, without hesitation, "Why -- Len Hooper. Because he
knows so many things -- and is so understanding."
Nobody
truly knows himself. But, in a place like Dunnybrook, his
neighbors know him, and remember . . . .
I
cannot say who may be my Sarah's great lady. It is too soon to
tell. But she will have one . . . .
Edited and annotated by Terry Heller, Coe
College, with substantial assistance from Linda Heller and
Mary Dias.