Sarah Orne Jewett

Sarah Orne Jewett (September 3, 1849 – June 24, 1909) was an American author and poet whose works were primarily set in her native New England.

Quotes

A harbor, even if it is a little harbor, is a good thing, since adventurers come into it as well as go out, and the life in it grows strong, because it takes something from the world, and has something to give in return.
- Country By-Ways, River Driftwood (1881)

The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper — whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.
- Letter to Willa Cather, quoted in the preface to The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories (1925)

It does seem so pleasant to talk with an old acquaintance who knows what you know. I see so many new folks nowadays who seem to have neither past nor future. Conversation has got to have some root in the past, or else you have got to explain every remark you make, and it wears a person out.
- As quoted in Reader's Digest Vol. 130 (1987)

"Step in some afternoon," he said, as affectionately as if I were a fellow-shipmaster wrecked on the lee shore of age like himself.
- Ch. 7

We were standing where there was a fine view of the harbor and its long stretches of shore all covered by the great army of the pointed firs, darkly cloaked and standing as if they waited to embark. As we looked far seaward among the outer islands, the trees seemed to march seaward still, going steadily over the heights and down to the water's edge.
- Ch. 7

Yes'm, old friends is always best, 'less you can catch a new one that's fit to make an old one out of.
- Ch. 12

In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness.
- Ch. 15

So we die before our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end.
- Ch. 19

When I was as you are now, towering in the confidence of twenty-one, little did I suspect that I should be at forty-nine, what I now am.
- Samuel Johnson, in a letter to Bennet Langton , published in The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791), by James Boswell

The nineteenth-century poet and novelist Sarah Orne Jewett lived for thirty years with Annie Fields in what was, in that century, called a Boston Marriage. It was considered a respectable arrangement, and friends and community acknowledged the life-companion relationship as a genuine article of devotion. When Annie Fields, however, intended to publish the letters between her and Jewett in the 1920s and after the latter's death, her close friend Mark De Wolfe Howe counseled against inclusion of any mention of their love for each other. This meant deleting four-fifths of the correspondence. Howe's objections stemmed from his fear of accusations of "perversity" against his friend in the sexually charged world of Freudian analysis. Faderman concludes that while the love between Jewett and Fields "was common and appropriate behavior in the century in which the two women had spent most of their lives (and Howe himself saw it as common and appropriate at the time)... it suddenly became "abnormal" in a twentieth century context, although nothing about the nature of the relationship had changed."
- Bettina Aptheker Tapestries of Life: Women's Work, Women's Consciousness, and the Meaning of Daily Experience (1989)

Feminist literary critics have shown how in the 19th century women writers began to acknowledge women as their muses and their role models...Margaret Fuller and Sarah Orne Jewett acknowledged their indebtedness to Madame de Staël, the author of Corinne...The list could be indefinitely extended to show the almost desperate search of writing women for authoritative female predecessors.
- Gerda Lerner The Creation of Feminist Consciousness (1993)

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