'Write from your center . . . to the world'

 

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

 

Born in South Berwick, Maine on Sept. 3, 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 are The Country of the Pointed Firs; A Country Doctor; and a collection of her best short stories titled A White Heron.  Many of her poems are collected in the book Verses.  

 

“You must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world,” she said about the importance of self-reflection and authenticity in writing and life.  “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.”