# Representative women of New England/Sarah Orne Jewett

​SARAH ORNE JEWETT, Litt. D.— An assured position among American men and women of letters has been won by Sarah Orne Jewett in her thirty and more years of authorship, dating from her first contribution to the Atlantic Monthly, December, 1869. Miss Jewett is a native of South Berwick, Me. Born September 3, 1849, the second daughter of Theodore H. Jewett, M.D., and his wife Caroline, she still retains, with her sister Mary, her home in the well-known "Jewett House " at South Berwick, a comely and spacious mansion built in 1740, now rich in historical associations.
Miss Jewett is of English descent, traced through long lines of American ancestry, with a French strain inherited from her paternal grandmother. Her maternal grandparents were Dr. William and Abigail (Oilman) Perry, the grandmother a daughter of Nathaniel Gilman and descendant of Edward Gilman, one of the earliest settlers of Exeter, N.H.
Dr. Theodore H. Jewett (Bowdoin College, 1834; Jefferson Medical College, 1840) was a man of note in his profession, which trusted and beloved as a family physician, and for some years a professor in the Medical School connected with Bowdoin College. Sarah, in her girlhood, not being strong and needing all the outdoor life possible, used often to accompany her father during his long drives to visit his country patients. Her reading and study received most of its direction at home, though at intervals she attended the South Berwick Academy.
While yet of school age, she wrote for Our Young Folks and the Rivemide Magazine. F'or a few years, as witnessed by the index to the Atlantic Monllih/, 1857-76, she veiled her identity as an author under the pen name of Alice Eliot. "Deephaven," her first book, published in 1877, has been followed by several novels, as "A Country Doctor," "A Marsh Island," and "The Tory Lover" (1901); a number of volumes of short stories and sketches, including (not to mention them all) "Country By-ways," "Old Friends and New," "The Mate of" the 'Daylight' and Friends Ashore," "The King, of Folly Island and Other People," "A White Heron and Other Stories"; three stories for girls—namely, "Betty Leicester," "Betty Leicester's Christmas," and "Playdays"; and "The Story of the Normans," in Putnam's series of Stories of the Nations.
From competent critics Miss Jewett's writings have received gracious meed of praise. Instance the following, which bears date 1897: "As the best material for stories may be wasted by unskilled hands, so the plain, the meagre, the commonplace, may be used to marvellous advantage by the masters of the craft Miss Jewett's 'Country of the Pointed Firs' is a case in point. . . . The casual observer could see little of interest here (in a fishing village on the Maine coast), the average writer could make little of what he sees, but the acute and sympathetic; observer, the exceptional writer, comes on the scene, looks about, thinks, writes, and, behold! a fascinating story." Later work in 1900 called forth this appreciation: "With​out falsifying either inanimate or human nature, she transmutes their ruggedness into pure gold, and arranges a harmony without one jarring note."
The scene of "The Tory Lover," Miss Jewett's latest work, is laid in the neighborhood of her own town of South Berwick. The famous Paul Jones is one of its personages, and other figures are drawn with due regard to historic facts and probabilities. The story is told with all the grace and skill which characterize her literary workmanship.
In 1901 Miss Jewett received from Bowdoin College the degree of Doctor of Literature, she being the first woman thus honored by that institution.