Sarah Orne Jewett
Sarah Orne Jewett House, South Berwick, ca. 1900. Photo: Collections of Old Berwick Historical Society.
Sarah Orne Jewett was born in South Berwick to Theodore Herman Jewett, an obstetrician, and Caroline Frances. Jewett loved reading and made extensive use of her family's library as she grew up. Jewett graduated from Berwick Academy in 1866. Two years later, Jewett published her first short story, "Jenny Garrow's Lovers," in the Flag of Our Union, a weekly publication in Boston.
Throughout the course of her career, Jewett wrote several novels, short stories, and poetry. Some of her most notable work includes Deephaven (1877) and the Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), which made her one of the most influential authors of the American literary regionalism movement. Sometimes called 'local color,' this writing style focuses on description of place, people, and customs over plot. Jewett's writing was heavily influenced by South Berwick, coastal Maine, and the natural world around her. Dialogue she included in her work was written phonetically to convey the Downeast accent as accurately as possible. These efforts brought a level of realism to her work that provides modern readers with an insight into how people spoke, and what life was like in coastal Maine. The way she wrote the Downeast accent even made its way to the big screen-according to Robert Eggers, her work directly informed the dialogue in The Lighthouse (2019).
Sapphic romance and relationships routinely showed up in Jewett's professional and personal writing, including in poetry and letters written to Annie Adams Fields, a close friend who later became her wife. In what was colloquially known as a "Boston Marriage," the two exchanged vows and lived together for thirty years at Fields's home in Boston and Jewett's in South Berwick.
The Sarah Orne Jewett House, a Georgian-style house built in 1777 that Jewett inherited from her grandfather, is now a historic house museum in South Berwick and is a designated National Historic Landmark.
