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Reviews of
LETTERS OF SARAH ORNE JEWETT.
Edited by Annie Fields.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1911
Among Books and their WritersBoston: North Berwick is about 7 miles northeast of Jewett's actual home in South Berwick, ME.
The Christian Science Monitor, 9 October, 1911, p. 2
Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett
Show a Sensitive, Gracious,
Loving Woman at Height
of Her Aspirations
GIVE PEN PICTURES
Her Judgments Not Always
Dispassionate or Unbiased
but Her Views Still of
Interest and Value
In one of his sprightly and thoughtful essays, Augustine Bissell, who like Woodrow Wilson, has been deflected from literature by politics, says that Dr. Johnson is fortunate in that he is a "[ unrecognized word ]* personality," and this not only because of Boswell's incomparable service, but because of Johnson's own letters. "To be able to say what one means in a letter is a great gift, but at the same time to show what you are is [ immortality ? ]," adds Mr. Bissell.
Now it is the [ unrecognized word ] of the "letters of Sarah Orne Jewett" (Houghton Mifflin & Co.) that they do transmit to the reader the personality of the writer. They show precisely the sort of sensitive, gracious, loving, aspiring woman that she was. [ It ? ] is a woman who can best be described in her own quotation from Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, "Too useful to be lonely, and to busy to be sad."
There is much in these collected letters that [ lets ? ] light on the artistic method and aims of one of the finest American writers of short stories whose work, while she lived, attracted the attention and won the admiration of Kipling and many of the masters of French fiction, along with the unusual honor of translation into French. These epistles, in most cases addressed to the editor of the collection, Mrs Annie Fields, give side lights on the higher intellectual life of New and Old England, and, to some extent, France during the last of the nineteenth and the opening of the twentieth century, that will always be invaluable both in their judgments of men and women and their books and of artists and their craftsmanship. They also [ give ? ] pen pictures of rural landscapes in Maine and France that are gems of verbal delineation, and they have [scattered ? ] through them etchings in [ unrecognized words ] of human types, urban and rural that are admirable. No person [ unrecognized words ] as Miss Jewett did during the latter half of her life, the friendship of Mrs. Fields and all that this implied [ for ? ] contact with the [ unrecognized word ] men and women of literature, [ unrecognized words ] visiting Boston, or with distinguished Europeans visiting [ unrecognized words ] seeing and hearing [ unrecognized words ] naturally found its way into [ the letters ? ] and thus was gathered up [ unrecognized words ] with delight by coming generations.
Yet the [ chief ? ] value of the correspondence [ unrecognized words ] disclosure of a personality that Mrs. [ Alice ? ] Meynell said was the [ unrecognized words ] that she had ever known. [ Unrecognized words ][ meant ? ] not the one with the least personality; far from it; but rather the least selfish, most mindful of the needs of others.
At a time when much of the literature by women and about women, whether in the form of autobiography, the novel, or the elaborate treatise on love or marriage is keyed to the note of self-assertion, revolt against convention, and criticism of established codes of conduct for women, and when women no longer can be counted upon invariably as religious, the appearance of a collection of human documents like this is the more noticeable. Here the underlying assumptions of the womanly ideal are that "life is duty as well as beauty," that the normal condition of human association is service, that affairs of sex are not to be the subject of general of promiscuous discussion, and that the chief end of an artist is not to be a pessimistic realist but an optimistic idealist. So that even if no formal biography of Miss Jewett ever appears, if the world never gets the other side of the interesting friendships and correspondences that are indicated by these letters, it will still be possible to refer to them any person who, happening long, asks what the best type of unmarried New England woman was doing and thinking as the one century ran out its sands and the new one came in.
It was an unusual group of woman interpreters of the modernized yet still Puritan New England which Harriet Beecher Stowe led. Of them the only survivor now is Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford. Rose Terry Cooke, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Gail Hamilton, Celia Thaxter, Lucy Larcom, Harriet Waters Preston, Louisa M. Alcott and Sarah Orne Jewett. What a group they made! None of them major figures like George Eliot, but nevertheless a combination that have left in prose and verse a record of a New England that is passing and changing, and that will find daughters of a different race, stock, and faith to depict much of its future life, rural as well as urban.
It is not claimed for these letters of Miss Jewett that they have the rare charm of Madame de Sevigne's or Fanny Kemble's, or that the judgments of men expressed in them are always those of a dispassionate critic. Certainly Matthew Arnold's praise is pitched too high, as Gladstone's too low; and it is evident that Mrs. Humphry Ward was too dear a friend to be judged fairly as a writer of fiction by the Maine authoress. There is no revelation of an abiding and meaningful friendship between the writer and a man, such as existed between Judge French and Gail Hamilton or Miss Mitchell and Phillips Brooks. What is depicted with the rare beauty of delineation is the complete trust of the younger for an older woman, an utter sharing with her of the impressions that men and books made upon one who was singularly reverent, [ sane ? ] and kindly disposed; there is also the gain in breadth of vision, mastery of technique and sympathy of understanding of an author fortunate enough to enjoy both the society of the intellectual and spiritual elite of her time, and to travel profitably beyond seas. That she never traveled much in her own land is to be regretted. That fact explains a provincial note, a limiting of the horizon, a perfect satisfaction in an orbit that had two foci -- North Berwick and Boston.* Hence also an inevitable future limitation of her audience, save as a perennial interest must turn all Americans of all time toward New England as the matrix in which much of national life was cast, just as countless future generations of Canadian, Australian and South African readers must turn back to Jane Austen and George Eliot for pictures of the society of old England, whence the new nations sprung.
Notes
word: The copy of this review available from Proquest is of poor quality. There is a good deal of guesswork in this transcription, and some words could not be discerned or guessed.
This paragraph is interestingly mistaken about Jewett's travels and friendships with men, probably because these aspects of her life were not well represented in the Fields collection of letters. Though Jewett did not, indeed, travel west of the Mississippi River, her travels in the Atlantic states, the upper Midwest and Canada were in fact frequent and fairly wide-ranging. Her notable friendships with men included John Greenleaf Whittier and Thomas Bailey Aldrich.
Sarah Orne Jewett:
A Collection of Her Familiar Letters
New York Tribune, 15 October, 1911, p. A6.
LETTERS OF SARAH ORNE JEWETT. Edited by Annie Fields. With portraits. Square crown 8vo. pp. 259 The Houghton Mifflin Company.
Miss Jewett's stories of New England life will be cherished we believe, when more ambitious work is forgotten. Of their kind they are perfect, and taken together they form a social document of genuine value. The generation with which she dealt so sympathetically has nearly if not quite passed, and with other times have come other manners. The traits and emotions that appealed to this painter of real life were as old as the world, but they developed in an atmosphere of simplicity and reticence that does not belong to the twentieth century. If some critic of the future shall venture to say that she has unduly idealized her rustic characters he may be confronted with passages in these letters which show forth the real people whom she drew or from whom she gathered one hint or another for portraiture.Witness her mention of the death of one of these old friends: "My stories are full of her here and there, as you know," she says, "and she has made a great part in the rustic side of my life and so in the town side." Happy the period, the place and the people that have had a chronicler so loving and loyal in feeling and understanding.
There is a pleasant fragrance of friendship in these letters, there is a gentle refinement and there are evidences of appreciation of all that is beautiful in human life, art and nature. The reader closes the book with admiration for the feminine character winningly revealed therein. But it must be admitted that this is not one of the collections of letters which the world cannot do without. It is perhaps the lack of humor which causes them to leave us cold, for that is a grievous lack indeed in your epistle to a friend. The sentiment sometimes seems to drop into sentimentality, but that. no doubt, is the fault of hard type -- it might not seem so on the written page meant only for the eye of affection. As for the literary judgments expressed there, we do not find them always sound. Some of them are due to either a failure in taste or to a personal liking for the author whose work is discussed with undeserved enthusiasm. We must not neglect to note, however, that there are many passages testifying to their writer's perception and enjoyment of what is noblest in literature. There is a suggestive paragraph on story writing in one of the letters of 1896: "I think we must know what good work is before we can do good work of our own, and so I say study work that the best judges have called good, and see why it is good; whether it is in that particular story, the reticence or the bravery of speech, the power of suggestion that is in it or the absolute clearness and finality of revelation: whether it sets you thinking or whether it makes you see a landscape with a live human figure living its life in the foreground."* As for her own methods, it is worth while to quote this bit of experience:
Good heavens, what a wonderful kind of chemistry it is that evolves all the details of a story and writes them presently in one flash of time! For two weeks I have been noticing a certain string of things and having hints of character, etc., and day before yesterday the plan of the story comes into my mind and in half an hour I have put all the little words and ways into their places and can read it off to myself like print. Who does it? for I grow more and more sure that I don't!We note with pleasure the charming glimpses of our author's intimacy with the cheerful outdoor world -- in the garden she is "neighborly with the hop toads and with a joyful robin who was sitting on a corner of the barn", she was a true lover of birds and of faithful dogs. She had, too, a childlike love of fun sometimes, as this little winter scene shows:
This morning I was out taking a drive about town with John, and I saw such a coast from way up the long hillside down to the tavern garden, and directly afterward down in the village I beheld Stubby faring along with his sled, which is about as large as a postage-stamp. So I borryed it, as you say, and was driven up to the top of the hill street, and down I slid over that pound-cake frosting of a coast most splendid, and meekly went back to the village and returned the sled. Then, an hour later, in bursts Stubby, with shining morning face: "There were two fellows that said Aunt Sarah was the boss, she went down side-saddle over the hill, just like the rest of the boys!"We will end with an extract on a graver key -- the description of the last coming of Phillips Brooks into the church in which he had done so noble a work:
When the coffin came up the aisle, carried shoulder high by those tall young men, the row of grave young faces, the white lilies, and the purple pall! -- it was like some old Greek festival and the Christian service joined together. The great hymn as they went out again -- "For All Thy Saints Who from Their Labors Rest"; the people beginning it as if with a burst of triumph, and the voices stopping and stopping until hardly anybody was left to sing at all, and all the people standing and crying as if their hearts would break -- you can't imagine what it was! But nothing has ever been such an inspiration -- it has been like a great sunset that suddenly turned itself into dawn.
Note
foreground: The reviewer has revised the punctuation of the passage from the Fields volume, adding and deleting commas. Similar small alterations in punctuation have been made in the other quoted passages in this review..
SARAH ORNE JEWETT'S LETTERS
Louisville Courier-Journal, 21 October 1911, p. 8.
To many who cherished Sarah Orne Jewett for her books or that charm of personality which so attractively marks her writings, these letters will be welcome. They have been collected and edited by Mrs. James T. Fields, to whom many of them were written.
The letters are in no sense remarkable. But they are so human, so infused with fervent love for nature, beauty, friends, books as at once to charm and stimulate the reader to finer appreciations. Her "Country of the Pointed Firs" is background in many of the letters. She begs a friend to go see some of the "most superb creatures that ever grew *** and standing so tall that their great green tops seem to belong to the next world." Of no less charm than her casual vignettes of her Maine woods are her happy touches here and there descriptive of something in the Old World -- the Apennines, green valleys on the way to Brindisi, or the Parthenon and the Grecian marbles — "the Orpheus and Eurydice and the Bacchic Dances *** row upon row. It is quite too much tor a plain heart to bear."
Among the recipients of the letters were Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Mrs. Meynell, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Misa Sara Norton, Mrs. Whitman. Celia Thaxter is a dim but fond memory in the letters -- one of which laments the death of dear Sandpiper, as Miss Jewett named her. There are a few letters describing visits to Tennyson -- "it is the high court of poetry at Aldworth whatever one may say." It was a visit rich in inspiration --"the great dignity and separateness of his life comes clearer than ever to mind. He seemed like a King in captivity, one of the Kings of old, of divine rights and sacred seclusions."
Not one of the letters but has that character and intimate charm which makes the beauty of familiar letters.
"A True Daughter of New England." * Annie Russell Marble,
Dial 51:1 (November 1911), pp. 337-9.
Recalling her parents, Miss Jewett emphasized three qualities which prevailed in the atmosphere of her early home: "wit, wisdom, and sweetness." These traits were transfused into her own personality, which has been so fully and tenderly revealed by her friend, Mrs. James T. Fields, in the volume of letters which are edited with fine taste and judgment. The graciousness and "sweet dignity" which characterized Miss Jewett are foand also in this revealment of her life through her letters to various friends in America and England. By far the larger number were written to Mrs. Fields, and the occasional words of the editor are full of understanding and affection, as well as a true appreciation of the literary worth of one of New England's most charming and sincere story-tellers.
From the days of her childhood – the "white mile-stone days" when she rode with her father in his doctor's chaise and learned to love nature and humanity – to the end of her productive years, Miss Jewett was impelled by one great purpose: "to make life a little easier for others." She accomplished this service in her neighborly relations, and also in her work as writer. She sympathized deeply with the domestic joys and trials of her fellow-villagers, and carried the same tenderly responsive heart into all places where she went. Toward the people whom she chose as models for her vital characters, many of whom lived near her home, she always kept the attitude of mind of a neighbor and friend; never did she assume a touch of the patronizing or curious visitor to the country. She rejoiced to be a part of the life which she depicted, and one of her early ambitions was to bring city and country people into more intimate and sympathetic relations. Mrs. Fields writes:
"Her métier was to lay open, for other eyes to see, those qualities in human nature which ennoble their possessors, high or low, rich or poor; those floods of sympathy to be unsealed in the most unpromising and dusty natures by the touch of a divining spirit. Finding herself in some dim way the owner of this sacred touchstone, what wonder that she loved her work and believed in it?"In spite of her native dignity and a certain remoteness of manner, Miss Jewett entered into every phase of life with keen senses. She delighted to drive, to row, to picnic, and to coast – on one memorable occasion on a borrowed sled down the village hillside with such success that her nephew was proud of her reputation among his boy-friends, for "she went down side-saddle over the hill just like the rest of the boys." She loved nature with the trustfulness of a child. Like Thoreau, she personified the pines and considered them her noble friends. The scenic beauty of her stories, from "Marsh Rosemary," "White Heron," and "The Country Doctor," to "Deephaven" and "The Country of the Pointed Firs," was inspired by her walks and drives within a short distance of her Berwick home, and such tales reflected her loving comradeship with trees and flowers and birds. The letters contain many exquisite nature-pictures, often warmed by tender sentiment. A few examples may be given."Hepaticas are like some people, very dismal blue, with cold hands and faces. . . . I believe there is nothing dearer than a trig little company of anemones in a pasture, all growing close together as if they kept each other warm, and wanted the whole sun to themselves, beside. They had no business to wear their summer frocks so early in the year." . . . "But, oh! I have foand such a corner of this world, under a spruce tree, where I sit for hours together, and neither thought nor good books can keep me from watching a little golden bee, that seems to live quite alone, and to be laying up honey against cold weather. He may have been idle and now feels belated, and goes and comes from his little hole in the groand close by my knee, so that I can put my hand over his front door and shut him out, -- but I promise you and him that I never will. He took me for a boulder the first day we met; but after he flew roand and roand he understood things, and knows now that I come and go as other boulders do, by glacial action, and can do him no harm. A very handsome little bee, and often to be thought of by me, come winter."Although Miss Jewett localized her backgrounds and characters, and thereby gained in vitality and genuineness, she carried her keen observation and clever descriptive pen upon trips abroad, and wrote delightful impressions of Whitby and Nassau, of the lilies and nightingales of France, and the romantic associations of Haworth and the Brontë vicarage. One of the rare experiences of her foreign visits was her acquaintance with Tennyson, whom she revered. "He seemed like a king in captivity, one of the kings of old, of divine rights and sacred seclusions. None of the greats gifts I have ever had out of loving and being with you seems to me so great as having seen Tennyson," so she wrote to Mrs. Fields.These letters give a partial record of Miss Jewett's literary likings and indulgences. They show wide range of subjects, and "heavy doses," so that one appreciates her fear that she "has been overeating with her head." Her impressions of books are keen and critical, including comments on anatomy and politics as well as distinctive literature. In preparation for her "History of the Normans," and her historical novel "The Tory Lover," she covered much groand in history. Thackeray and Carlyle were favorites with her, and to Dorothy Wordsworth she gives merited praise, both for literary skill in "A Tour in Scotland" and also for her stimulating influence upon her poet-brother and upon Coleridge. Miss Jewett acknowledges a debt to Mrs. Stowe's "Pearl of Orr's island," as an early incentive to her own simple New England stories. Although in her later work there was greater variety of structure and characters, yet she maintained her chosen type of fiction and gave life to what Mr. Kipling calls "the lovely New England landscape and the genuine New England nature." She always defended the art of realism.
"People talk about dwelling upon trivialities and commonplaces in life, but a master writer gives everything weight, and makes you feel the distinction and importance of it, and count it upon the right or the wrong side of a life's account. That is one reason why writing about simple country people takes my time and thought."
Again, in 1907, she wrote to Mr. Woodberry words of sane, sweet philosophy about her work and a writer's supreme efforts.
"What a joyful time it is to be close to the end of a long piece of work, and sad too, -- like coming into harbour at the end of a voyage. The more one has cared to put one's very best into a thing the surer he is to think that it falls far short of the 'sky he meant.' But it is certain that everything is in such a work that we have put in. The sense of failure that weighs the artist down is often nothing but a sense of fatigue. I always think that the trees look tired in autumn when their fruit has dropped, but I shall remember as long as I remember anything a small seedling apple-tree that stood by a wall in a high wild pasture at the White Hills, -- standing proudly over its first crop of yellow apples all fallen into a little almost hollow of the soft turf below. I could look over its head, and it would have been a heart of stone that did not beat fast with sympathy. There was Success! – but up there against the sky the wistfulness of later crops was yet to come."In passages like this, the reader finds reflections of the love of nature and mankind, the poise and resourcefulness and the bravery and faith of Miss Jewett as woman and author. Although her health was often poor, she never intruded a complaint, and her letters, like her stories, are always hopeful and refreshing. Even after the accident which cramped her later years of activity, she wrote with patience and often with humor. "Though I feel like a dissected map with a few pieces gone, the rest of me seems to be put together right!" Bowdoin College honored itself when it conferred upon Miss Jewett the degree of Litt.D., and she delighted "to be the single sister of so many brothers at Bowdoin." The beautiful memorial window to her father at this college was one of her dreams come true. Writing to her friend, Mrs. Whitman, its designer, she expressed the key-note of her noble spirit and her life of service."But how the days fly by, as if one were riding the horse of Fate and could only look this way and that, as one rides and flies across the world. Oh, if we did not look back and try to change the lost days! if we can only keep our faces towards the light and remember that whatever happens or has happened, we must hold fast to hope! I never forget the great window. I long for you to feel a new strength and peace every day as you work at it, -- a new love and longing. The light from heaven must already shine through it into your heart."
*LETTERS OF SARAH ORNE JEWETT. Edited by Annie Fields. With portrait. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.
A VOLUME OF LETTERS BY SARA[H] ORNE JEWETT
Indianapolis Star, 9 December 1911, p. 6
Miss Sarah Orne Jewett, who wrote some of the best short stories in American literature, stories that portray native life and characters with an intimate and delicate comprehension that no one else has equaled, also wrote, it appears, equally delightful letters. Mrs. James T. Fields, who was for years Miss Jewett's close friend, publishes a volume of these letters. They were nearly all written to Mrs. Fields and extend over a period of many years. They almost form a diary, so continuous are they and so expressive of the writer's inner self. They disclose a beautiful personality, a sweet and gentle soul, a lover of the finer things of life and literature. She comments freely on books -- new ones as they appear from time and old ones that she also rereads to renew the first joy in them -- and what she says in her informal graceful way is discriminating and illuminating and causes wonder and regret that she never indulged in essay writing on similar themes for the public. Her stories were written with the simplicity of great art; in these intimate letters there is no thought of form or studied effort, yet they have their own charm and beautifully supplement her fiction. They will be read with interest by all who admire her work. Miss Jewett died in 1909.
From "Famous Women of Yesterday:
Some Biographies, with a Sprinkling of Volumes on the Sex's Progress.
New York Times, 18 February 1912, p. BR89
A Modern Jane Austen
It is a pity more people do not realize what they miss in leaving Sarah Orne Jewett's books unread. They are as thoroughly feminine in their understanding and view of life as are Jane Austen's, possessing nothing of that masculine grasp which makes the books of Sand and Eliot rather the work of artists than of women. But for this very reason the New Englander's stories have a quite particular charm and value, a quality inherently womanly, yet none the less human, wise and rich. A sense of fun runs through them all like a silver brook, and a rare sympathy for everyday folk unites them. Village annals, sincere and simple, in which joy and suffering, sorrow and self-sacrifice, good and evil go about quietly, without fuss or parade. They are full of drama and singularly alive.
It is not the seven slender volumes* of fiction she left behind her of which we have here to speak, however, but of the collection of. Miss Jewett's "Letters" made and edited by Mrs. Annie Fields, (Houghton Mifflin Company, $1.50,) a book largely made up of extracts from letters written to the latter, though many letters to other people are included, notably a number to the T. B. Aldriches, Aldrich then being editor of The Atlantic, in which so many of Miss Jewett's stories appeared; to George Woodberry, Sarah Norton, Mrs. Ward and Mrs. George Howe. The volume opens with a short, informal sketch of the main incidents in an uneventful life, and an appreciation of a character whose felicities the ensuing pages confirm and emphasize. The letters are indeed a treat.
Most of them are written from the small village in Maine where Miss Jcwett was born, and where she lived all her life, South Berwick, a quaint little place up the river from Portsmouth, N. H. She loved this place dearly, and most of her characters and plots are concerned with it. But she went several times to England and the Continent, meeting many of the literary people of the day, and of these travelings and encounters others of the letters give charming glimpses. In all of them is perceptible a fine and serene temperament, a mind awake to everything beautiful and capable of finding it in unlikely spots, a keen sensitiveness to the experiences of her friends, with youthful, fresh enthusiasm that lasts to the end.
Altogether it is an admirable book to take up, revealing a rare personality, one lovable and generous. It ought to send many readers to Miss Jewett's stories, the stories of which their author says in one of the letters: "Who does them? I'm sure I don't." Certainly no one else could, for they are as individual as is the correspondence itself, though they have to do with other people's experiences and are hardly ever autobiographical.
Note
seven slender volumes: This number probably refers to a then recent collected edition of Jewett's short fiction. In fact, during her lifetime, she published eighteen volumes of fiction, not all of them slim.
Edited by Terry Heller, Coe CollegeAssistant: Linda Heller
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