Is It the Right Choice or Wrong?

 “God would not give us the same talent if what were right for men were wrong for women.” – Sarah Orne Jewett

Born in Maine on this date in 1849, Jewett was a novelist, short story writer and poet, best known for her local color works set along or near the southern seacoast of Maine.  She is recognized as an important practitioner of what became known as American Literary Regionalism.

 

Educated in Boston, where she met many of New England’s leading writers while still in her teens, Jewett was first published in Atlantic Monthly in 1868 and went on to become one of the most-read short story writers of the 1870s and ‘80s.  Fellow author William Dean Howells said Jewett possessed "an uncommon feeling for talk — I hear your people."

 

Best known among her 20 books (many still in print today) are The Country of the Pointed Firs; A Country Doctor; A White Heron,          a collection of her best short stories; and the children’s book Betty Leicester.  Many of her poems are collected in the book Verses.  

 

Shortly before her death in 1909 she was asked how she chose her wide variety of topics? “The thing that teases the mind over and over for years and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper, is whether – little or great – it belongs to Literature.”

 

 

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