On her 53rd birthday, 3 September 1902, a horse stumbled near
South Berwick, ME, throwing Sarah Orne Jewett from her
carriage. Never fully recovering from her head and neck
injuries and plagued by headaches, she felt incapable
thereafter of the sustained concentration required to continue
her profession as a fiction writer. Still, she continued to
exchange letters, hundreds of them, composed by hand, most
with a pen dipped in an ink bottle.
Some of her 1902-1909 letters indicate that this writing also
was difficult, but still she wrote multiple letters almost
daily. At that time, her closest friends were her older
sister, Mary Rice Jewett (1847-1930) and her companion since
the early 1880s, Annie Adams Fields (1834-1915), widow of the
publisher and
Atlantic editor, James T. Fields
(1817-1881). When she was apart from either, she sent daily
reports. With these two and a large circle of close friends
and family, she had corresponded regularly all her adult life.
Critics and biographers have noticed that friendship is a main
theme for Jewett. Among her most-loved short stories are "Miss
Tempy's Watchers" (1888) and "Martha's Lady" (1897): both
trace the power of affection to connect separated friends. My
personal favorite, "The Queen's Twin" (1899), turns on an
imaginary intimacy between a solitary New England country
widow and Queen Victoria.
At the opening of Jewett's best-known work,
The Country of
the Pointed Firs (1896), a narrator says of the village
that is the book's setting: "The process of falling in love at
first sight is as final as it is swift in such a case, but the
growth of true friendship may be a lifelong affair." Two
especially interesting essays examine friendship in this
novel: Marcia Folsom's "'Tact Is a Kind of Mind-Reading':
Empathic Style in Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the
Pointed Firs."
Colby Library Quarterly 18.1 (Mar.
1982): 66-78, and Laurie Shannon's "'The Country of Our
Friendship': Jewett's Intimist Art."
American Literature
71.2 (June 1999): 27-62. They argue that the narrative focuses
upon the growth of friendship that follows upon the
mysterious, initial attraction, showing that Jewett's main
characters illustrate the fulfilling labor of cultivating
intimacy. Shannon contends that the book may be read as a
devotional manual, in which to foster caring becomes a
spiritual discipline.
Probably in 1897, on Jewett's 48th birthday, she wrote to
another close friend, Sara Norton (1864-1922), oldest daughter
of Harvard professor Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908) :
One feels how easy it is for friends to slip away
out of this world and leave us lonely…. There is something
transfiguring in the best of friendship. One remembers the
story of the transfiguration in the New Testament, and sees
over and over in life what the great shining hours can do,
and how one goes down from the mountain where they are, into
the fret of everyday life again, but strong in remembrance.
I once heard Mr. [Phillips] Brooks preach a great sermon
about this: nobody could stay on the mount, but every one
knew it, and went his way with courage by reason of such
moments.
Here Jewett finds religious significance in the shining
moments of friendship, when the spiritual identities of
companions show forth, as Jesus's divinity was manifested to
his disciples in Matthew 17. Moments of intimacy unveil the
souls of friends, and such revelations sustain them when
apart, whether temporarily or permanently.
During her final two years, Jewett and Willa Cather
(1873-1947) became close friends. Many believe this
relationship led to Cather abandoning her successful
journalism career to become a Pulitzer-winning novelist. What
we have of Cather's side of their correspondence recently
appeared in
The Selected Letters of Willa Cather
(2013) by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout. Critics have
thoroughly discussed Jewett's advice to Cather; here I will
take note of their personal relationship in letters of 1908.
While Cather's 10 May account of a day in southern Italy may
seem overly literary, in fact, she offers a vicarious journey
of the kind Jewett loved, though her health prevented her
return to Europe. Cather recalls a landscape she knew Jewett
had visited: "Do you, I wonder, remember what an extravagantly
beautiful place this is?" That Jewett appreciates such gifts
shows in the affection she expresses for Cather in a 17 August
letter: "I wish that I could see you and that something might
bring you to Boston …. Send me one word on office paper to say
that you are getting on well. I envy you your work, even with
all its difficulties. I wish that I could take a handful for
my own hand, and to help you."
The final letter we have from Cather to Jewett (19 December)
responds to Jewett's career advice. It concludes:
Of all these things … I long to talk to you. In
lieu of so doing I have been reading again this evening
"Martha's Lady." I do think it is almost the saddest and
loveliest of stories. It humbles and desolates me every time
I read it -- and somehow makes me willing to begin all over
and try to be good; like a whipping used to do when I was
little. Perhaps after Christmas I can slip up to Boston for
a day. Until then a world of love to you and all the well
wishes of this season, an hundred fold warmer and more
heartfelt than they are wont to be. I shall think of you and
of Mrs. Fields often on Christmas Day.
Jewett's pain obliged her to abandon writing fiction after her
1902 accident, but she would not cease corresponding, because
to cherish intimacy was "the bread of life"; it was communion.
As Cather suggests in her comment on "Martha's Lady," Jewett's
stories can touch strangers in the way her letters often spoke
to her friends, creating epiphanies in which readers learn to
recall and to treasure the shining moments of the best of
friendship.
When I retired from teaching in 2013, I began what I thought
would be a several year project of collecting, transcribing
and annotating the correspondence of Sarah Orne Jewett. I soon
learned that this was a far more massive project than I
imagined. As I worked, the project seemed not to
shorten, but to lengthen out ahead of me. I realized that a
truly complete and useful collection would include the letters
she received and then, it seemed necessary to include a good
number of letters exchanged among friends on the assumption
that Jewett would read them. In 2024, eleven years into
the project, the point at which I will consider it as complete
as I can make it still seems years into the future, though I
believe I have collected all of the materials I expect to
include.
In the beginning, this collection was organized in a fairly
simple chronology. The small number of relevant letters
from before 1870 and after 1909 were gathered in a few files
and the rest appeared in annual files. Some files have grown
so large that I have divided the years of 1882 and 1898 into
two files each, separating out letters from trips Jewett and
Fields made to Europe.
The Future of the
Collection: Digital and Print
In 2023, Melissa Homestead, University of
Nebraska, Lincoln, and other respected colleagues,
succeeded in making me understand that this collection
faced a perilous future. While I was trudging along
with my work, the field of digital scholarship had grown
far beyond my knowledge and skills. I learned that
creating a permanent digital archive of Jewett's
correspondence would require scarce resources that I do
not have and that no one else is likely to be able to
obtain in the foreseeable future. Once I reach my mortal
limit, the collection will lose its devoted patron, and it
will disappear into digital oblivion, accessible to some
extent only through the Wayback Machine.
Because the correspondence archive could not long outlive
me, I cast about for ways to preserve it, finally turning
to "old tech," that is, print. In 2023, then, I invented
the Sarah Orne Jewett Press, and I began producing paper
booklets of other parts of the Sarah Orne Jewett Text
Project that seemed to me worth preserving. During
2023, I printed 15 such booklets. Paper copies were
distributed free to a few institutions willing to add them
to their collections, and digital PDF copies will remain
available at SOJTP as long as that web archive remains in
existence. A link to SOJ Press documents appears on
the index page here:
http://www.sarahornejewett.org/soj/1-jewettpress/index-sojp.html
As soon as I am able, I will begin making and distributing
booklets of the correspondence.
I had hoped a good number of institutional libraries would be
willing to hold the books, but of those I tried, only a few
have added them to their collections. At some future
date, it may be helpful to know where they can be found.
WorldCat currently lists most of them. Here is my list.
Bowdoin College
Coe College
Colby College
Maine Women Writers Collection, University of New England
Massachusetts Historical Society
University of Maine, Orono
Collecting
Jewett's Correspondence
Collecting all the existing letters of Sarah Orne Jewett
surely is impossible. She wrote and received thousands
of letters. Many have not survived. Those that
survive are scattered throughout the United States in archives
and private collections. As her correspondence was
international, some remain outside the U.S. The title of
this section of the Sarah Orne Jewett text project, therefore,
must be aspirational.
The goal of "The Correspondence" has become to develop a
repository of transcriptions of Jewett-related correspondence,
a dense and rich record of the lives of Jewett, her friends
and acquaintances.
While this collection began as an attempt
to collect letters written by Jewett, it has grown to include
several other bodies of material:
A. letters written to Jewett,
B. letters written by Annie Fields
that concern Jewett or that were understood by their
recipients as coming from both Fields and Jewett,
C. letters written to Annie Fields
that concern Jewett or were understood to be shared with
Jewett,
D. letters exchanged among Jewett's
closest friends that concern her or that deal with topics that
Jewett probably was discussing with them,
E. other documents authored by Jewett
and her friends, i.e. journal entries, that supplement or
comment upon topics discussed in the correspondence.
Omitted Materials
Especially as I came to work more with
Jewett's correspondents, I encountered more letters that
seemed unreadable. Some eccentric handwriting
becomes more accessible as one becomes familiar with it,
but too often for my desires, letters prove
indecipherable. I found myself putting hours into a few
pages with little satisfying result, often with letters
that came to seem less important the more I
struggled. So, I reluctantly decided to leave some
letters out of the collection. To aid readers and to
salve my conscience, I keep an annotated list of these
items. That list appears at the end of this
document.
The first letters to be gathered have
been helpfully annotated by a number of scholars, notably
Richard Cary, whose collection
Sarah Orne Jewett Letters
(1967), along with Fields's
Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett
(1911), was the starting point of this archive. Those
who build on this work will continue the annotation process
Cary established.
Two conflicting goals of annotation have
been balanced imperfectly: 1) allowing readers to study a
single letter without searching widely for the identities of
persons, the sources of allusions, etc., and 2) minimizing
redundancy for readers of groups of letters.
A list of correspondents provides basic
information about Jewett's correspondents and persons
frequently named and usually an indication of a few sources
for further information.
Though some effort is made to avoid often
repeating the same information about allusions, events, etc.
within each annual collection, this has proven difficult to
manage while developing the collection. As a result,
there almost certainly is more repetition than necessary;
readers will need to be patient with this feature.
Though I recognize the limits of Wikipedia
as a final source of information, still I indicate when there
is a Wikipedia article on a person or topic in the
letters. At the time I write this, it has almost come to
seem unnecessary to tell readers there is a Wikipedia article,
because so many topics are now covered. Still, it seems
likely to save readers time if they know they can begin
research with a quick look at this valuable on-line
information source.
Editorial
Practice in Transcriptions
^ ^ : The author has inserted text.
abc : The author has deleted text.
[ ] : Editorial comments and descriptions.
{ } : Editorial insertions in pursuit of clarity.
Jewett's periods often appear as dashes,
and also often are indistinguishable from commas. Where
her intentions seem clear, I have placed commas and periods;
when not sure I have given the dashes or included a note.
She is not consistent in using
apostrophes. I have presented words needing apostrophes
as she presents them.
Index and Searching
The practical difficulty of constructing and maintaining
an index has so far prevented any attempt at this, despite
the seemingly obvious value. The main work around for this
remains Google Search. A link for this appears on the main
correspondence index page here:
http://www.sarahornejewett.org/soj/let/Corresp/1-correspondence.html
However, as of 2024, this is not perfectly reliable. At
the end of 2022, Coe College stopped providing a home for
SOJTP, a few years after the archive was moved to Reclaim
Hosting. The process by which Google Search comes to
know a new location outside an academic institution is not
clear to me, but I can see that it is slow. A Google
Search of SOJTP does not yet yield all the instances of a
string.
As I often search my files while working on the
collection, I have a much more reliable method that others
may use with some effort. You can install Notepad++
and make use of its powerful Search / Find in Files
function. It will search on-line files, but you may
find it easier to download the SOJTP "Corresp" folder to
your own machine and then search the files there.