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SARAH ORNE JEWETT: A `NATURALLY AMERICAN’ WRITER

Sarah Orne Jewett:

A Writer`s Life

By Elizabeth Silverthorne

Overlook Press, 239 pages, $22.95

Willa Cather once wrote, “If I were asked to name three American books which have the possibility of a long, long life, I would say at once `The Scarlet Letter,’ `Huckleberry Finn,’ and `The Country of the Pointed Firs.’ ” Sarah Orne Jewett, author of that last book, is one of those American writers we dearly love but forget to consider, a writer perceived as so naturally American that she might almost be a part of the landscape-and so taken for granted.

In 1904, a writer in the Atlantic Monthly compared Jewett to “a spray of the trailing arbutus,” noting that the “fragrant, retiring, exquisite flower” symbolized her own “modest and delightful art.” She was much more, just as Emily Dickinson was more than a delicate recluse dressed in white. As Elizabeth Silverthorne-Jewett’s first biographer in more than 30 years-shows, hers was a life of immense activity, ambition, success, energy, joy and unconventionality.

The Jewetts were an influential and well-established family in South Berwick, Maine, where Sarah spent most of her life. She was born and she died in the same house, one her seafaring grandfather had bought. Her father, a country doctor, raised Sarah to be capable, well-read and strong-willed. He told her early on, “Don’t try to write about people and things. Tell them just as they are!”

She grew up surrounded by family and a strong sense of family history, “with grand-fathers and great-uncles and aunts for my best playmates.” “Deephaven,” her first published collection of sketches, won her warm acclaim when she was in her late 20s, and her popularity increased throughout her life. She counted among her friends and admirers literary greats whose range and number boggle the mind: among them, Emerson, Kipling, Tennyson, Mark Twain, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Celia Thaxter, Matthew Arnold, William and Henry James, Longfellow and Whittier, who referred to Sarah as “my adopted daughter.”

Jewett wrote with a simplicity as elegant as Shaker furniture, but she herself was not simple. Nor was she the country bumpkin critics sometimes liked to portray, though she deeply and truly loved the country people about whom she wrote: “I determined to teach the world that country people were not the awkward, ignorant set those persons seemed to think. I wanted the world to know their grand, simple lives; and so far as I had a mission when I first began to write, I think that was it.”

She travelled widely, read deeply and even as a young girl involved herself in a wide range of activities-publishing her first stories at age 18, teaching and re-cataloguing the library at Sunday School, accompanying her father on his medical rounds, “going for fast, tomboyish rides on her horse or for furious rowing sprees on the river.”

The most enduring love affair of her life was a so-called “Boston marriage” with Annie Fields, widow of Boston publisher James Fields. Silverthorne weighs the possibility that Sarah and Annie’s lifelong relation was not only romantic and passionate but sexual as well. In any event, the friendship ran deep and true; and with the exception of her father, who died when Jewett was in her 20s, her most vital relationships were with women.

In its best moments, this biography has a clear sense of its subject and fully portrays Jewett’s independent and optimistic life. While Silverthorne, who has also written a biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, sometimes tries to evoke Jewett’s own writing style, her prose is less skillful. For instance, she writes of Sarah and her father, “From early childhood he had been her closest companion, and it would have been surprising if she had not developed an Electra Complex in some degree.” Yet her sense of Jewett and her world is sure, and this book reminds us time and again of the dignity and eloquence of its subject.

As Jewett once wrote to Cather, then her young protege: “You must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up. Otherwise what might be strength in a writer is only crudeness, and what might be insight is only observation . . .-you can write about life, but never write life itself.”

Jewett followed her own advice, writing “life itself” in sketches and tales of rural Maine as poignant and true now as they were a century ago. This biography drives us back to her work.