"It's what belongs to literature'

 

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

 

Born in Maine in September of 1849. Jewett was a novelist, short story writer and poet, best known for her local color works set along or near Maine’s southern seacoast and recognized as an important practitioner of 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 A White Heron, which is a collection of her best short stories; A Country Doctor: and the children’s book Betty Leicester.  Many of her best poems are collected in the book simply known as Verses.  

 

Jewett, who died in 1909, said she often contemplated whether her works deserved recognition. 

 

“The thing that teases the mind over and over for years and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper,” she said, “is whether – little or great – it belongs to Literature.”