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Born in 1849 in South Berwick, Maine, Sarah Orne Jewett spent almost her entire life in the coastal town, forging her reputation as a great New England author. Jewett's father was a physician who often brought his daughter along on his medical calls to different homes across the countryside. As a young girl, Jewett closely observed her father's patients, learning about the different ways that everyday people in her region of Maine lived. Too ill with rheumatoid arthritis to follow in her father's footsteps of working in medicine, Jewett turned her attention to writing about the people she knew so well. As a teen, Jewett published her first short story. At 19, she published several short works about a town much like her home of South Berwick in The Atlantic Monthly. These stories caught the attention of author and publisher William Dean Howells, who encouraged her to keep writing. The collection of portraits of New England life became Jewett’s first book, Deephaven, published in 1877.

During her career, Jewett wrote novels, short stories, poetry, and children's books. Most were set in rural New England. Jewett's fiction described not only the appearance of the region but also the feeling of spending time there and the personalities of the people who called it home. For these portraits of rural life, Jewett played an important role in the development of American literary regionalism, a post-Civil War style of writing that aimed to capture distinctly American settings. In this genre often referred to as local color writing, authors evoke specific places through use of dialect, environmental descriptions, and traditions specific to the region. The genre is a blend of realism, writing that recreates situations and places exactly, and romanticism, writing that celebrates individuals finding deep meaning and emotional experiences in nature. Her novel, The Country of the Pointed Firs, is Jewett’s most critically acclaimed and well-known work. Jewett’s poems were published after her death in a collection called Verses, and today her poetry is just as well-known as her fiction. 

Jewett never married. She journaled often about her disdain of marriage as well as her deep connections to women in her life. When the husband of her best friend, Annie Fields, passed away, Jewett moved in with Fields and they lived together until Jewett passed away in 1909. Many historians believe Jewett was likely queer.

Next section Historical Context: The Industrial Revolution

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