'Write from your center . . . to the world'

 

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

 

Born in South Berwick, Maine onSept. 3, 1849 Jewett was a novelist, short story writer and poet, best knownfor her local color works set along or near the southern seacoast ofMaine.  She is recognized as an important practitioner of what becameknown as American Literary Regionalism.

 

Educated in Boston, where she metmany of New England’s leading writers while still in her teens, Jewett wasfirst published in Atlantic Monthly in 1868 and went onto become one of the most-read short story writers of the 1870s and‘80s.  Fellow author William Dean Howells said Jewett possessed “anuncommon feeling for talk — I hear your people.”

 

Best known among her 20 booksare The Country of the Pointed Firs; A Country Doctor; and acollection of her best short stories titled A White Heron.  Manyof her poems are collected in the book Verses.  

 

“You must find your own quiet centerof life, and write from that to the world,” she said about the importance ofself-reflection and authenticity in writing and life.  “The thing that teases the mind over and overfor years and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper is whether – littleor great – it belongs to Literature.”