Documentation for the Section of Diaries and Letters
Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project

by Terry Heller
Updated April 2021

Diaries

Content
Transcriptions of the known diaries kept by Sarah Orne Jewett
    And selected diaries of Annie Adams Fields that document shared experiences of the two women.
    The Fields diarties are located in the section of the project devoted to Annie Fields.

Annotation
    The Jewett diaries are lightly annotated; little effort has been made to identify the people she names or to document events to which she refers.
    The Fields diaries are heavily annotated, in part because they help to document the complex relationship between Jewett and Fields.

Transcription
    The diaries reflect two transcription styles.  The Jewett diaries were added comparatively early in the archive's development, when I was thinking primarily of making available readable transcriptions.  The Fields diary is more recent, and there I sought to provide a good deal of information about the manuscript while also retaining readability. 
    There I use these basic forms:

^  ^ :  The author has inserted text.
abc :  The author has deleted text.
{ }  :  Editorial insertions in pursuit of clarity.
[  ]  :  Editorial comments and descriptions.  [Ordinary text indicates guessing the author's intent; italics is editorial commentary.]
    In the letters, I have varied this, using { } to indicate editorial insertion of content, usually punctuation.

Letters

   

Content
There are two parts to the collection of letters:
    A:  a chronological collection that is intended to be comprehensive, including all known letters written by Jewett and to include as many as seem interesting written to her or about her;
    B:  the published collections of Jewett's letters.  These are presented, within reason, as they appear in their original print publication.

Structure of Part A
    The chronological collection includes a master list of correspondents along with the letters collected and annotated and arranged in files by year.
    The correspondents list provides information about each correspondent, intended mainly to help with dating letters, but also to indicate relationships between the correspondents.
    The contents page for this collection is: http://www.sarahornejewett.org/soj/let/Corresp/1-correspondence.html
    This presents a grid in which one can click on a year and open a page containing letters from that year arranged in what I currently believe is chronological order.  There is a file for letters that I am unable to date, with guesses about date range when that seems possible.

Structure of Part B
    The contents page for this collection lists publications of Jewett letters in chronological order and links to my presentations of these texts.


Annotation
    Part B contains the annotations of the original transcribers and editors, with corrections where problems have been found.
    Part A letters are heavily annotated.  The main motive for such annotation is to determine the dates of the letters, since most were not dated by day, month, and year, but usually only by day of the week.  Therefore, I have made great effort to identify persons, places and events that help to establish the composition dates, and I have presented the information gleaned in order to make it easy for future readers to check and correct my work.
    A complication of the annotation is that there are differing styles.  I have mainly preserved the notes produced by annotators other than myself, but I have taken liberties as well -- adding to and correcting material in the original notes.  I have tried with each letter to make clear who is responsible for the notes.
    Part A letters are designed to be "free-standing."  This means that each letter should be reasonably readable on its own, without the necessity of reading the other letters around it.  As a result, there is considerable redundancy as items in one letter are annotated again in later letters.  I have attempted to reduce lengthy repetition by making a list of persons -- correspondents and people often mentioned -- to which many notes point.  Often then, with just the letter and the Correspondents files open, one can gather most of the information necessary to make a letter understandable.  The notes explain items not in the Correspondents file and indicate the location of the manuscript.
    An important aid in enriching the annotations has been the work of Philip Kelley at the Wedgstone Press on the diaries of Annie Adams Fields, particularly his list of people mentioned in the diaries. This extensive list of people known to Fields has provided a number of clues to the identities of persons named in this correspondence.

Transcription
    There currently are multiple transcription styles.

    Letters transcribed by other editors follow their styles.
    Letters I transcribed more than a few years ago are presented for readability, with few textual notes.
    Letters I have transcribed since about 2011 follow the style used for the Fields Diaries. 

I continue to discover errors and inconsistencies, especially in my own work,  that I hope to correct over time. In an ideal future, the collection will arrive at reasonable consistency and a lower error rate.


Collecting
It may be useful for future developers of this part of the project to have a list of the archives from which I have collected letters, along with a few notes on what I have done.  As I write this, I am fully engaged in developing this collection, making it difficult to keep this information current.  Further, archives continue to collect and catalog materials.  In short, this list can only be provisional.
  

Archives from which Part A letters have been obtained

I believe I have collected ALL letters from these

Allegheny College
American Antiquarian Society
Amherst College
Bates College
Berwick Academy
Beverly (MA) Historical Society
Boston College
Boston University
Brown University
Chicago Historical Society
College of the Holy Cross (Transcribed and published by William L. Lucey, S. J.)
Columbia University
Duke University
Folger Library
Haverford College
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Memorial National Park -- Cambridge, MA
Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum
Library of Congress
Loyola University -- Chicago
Massachusetts Historical Society
Middlebury College
J. P. Morgan Library
New York Public Library
New York University
Northwestern University
Old Berwick Historical Society
Pennsylvania Historical Society
Portsmouth Athenaeum
Princeton University
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential  Library
Sarah Orne Jewett Museum
Smith College
University of Florida
University of Kentucky
University of Michigan
University of New Hampshire
University of Wisconsin
University of Virginia
Wellesley College
Yale University

I have many, but not all letters from these collections

Boston Public Library
Colby College (Most transcribed and published by Richard Cary and Scott Federick Stoddart)
Historic New England
Houghton Library, Harvard University
The Huntington Library
Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum
Maine Women Writers Collection
Schlesinger Library



If an archive is not named above, then I almost certainly have not yet collected letters there.  Future plans include:

Kent Bicknell, private collector
Bowdoin College
Emory University
Johns Hopkins University
Maine Historical Society
Newberry Library

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