Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World And Her Work (Radcliffe Biography Series) - Softcover

Blanchard, Paula

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0738208329 ISBN 13: 9780738208329

Publisher: Da Capo Press, 2002

Synopsis

Best known for her masterpiece, The Country of the Pointed Firs, Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) is a writer with enormous resonance for our time. Our fascination with place, with traditional values, and our yearning for a rural utopia all find fulfillment in Jewett's portrayal of the "grand and simple lives" of coastal Maine. In this delicious portrait, Paula Blanchard (biographer of Margaret Fuller and Emily Carr) plunges us into New England literary life in turn-of-the-century Boston, into the circles of Henry James, Lowell, Howell, Whittier, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. She delves into Jewett's close friendships with women, from the young Willa Cather and the flamboyant "Mrs. Jack" Gardner, and especially to Annie Fields, her partner in a sustaining "Boston marriage." Her enthralling and insightful glimpses into Jewett's fiction will send readers racing back to a writer of whose work Kipling said "it is the very life."

About this title

About the Author:

Paula Blanchard is the author of two highly acclaimed biographies: Margaret Fuller: From Transcendentalism to Revolution and The Life of Emily Carr, which was a selection of the Canadian Book of the Month Club and won the University of British Columbia's Award for Canadian Biography. She lives in Lexington, Massachusetts, and has spent much of her life near the coastal New England world of the "pointed firs."

From Kirkus Reviews:

A laudable, if cautious, attempt to reclaim the literary status of an important American author from successive waves of neglect and politically charged reinterpretation. Placing Jewett firmly within the pantheon of late 19th century intellectual society, Blanchard (Margaret Fuller, 1978) blends biography and textual analysis to reveal a life of apparently astonishing balance. Born in 1849 in the comfortable and bucolic town of South Berwick, Maine, the daughter of a broad-minded physician, Jewett managed the difficult feat, notes Blanchard, of gaining fame and fortune ``simply by going her own way and doing what she liked to do.'' Although she was past 40 when her most enduring work, The Country of the Pointed Firs, appeared, Jewett, despite crippling bouts of rheumatoid arthritis, began publishing in her teens. At 32 she established her extraordinarily successful liaison with Annie Fields, widow of publisher and Atlantic Monthly founder James T. Fields, and thereafter shuttled happily between her beloved Maine and the highbrow salons of Boston. While giving ample play to Jewett's singular achievement of creating a life and art that constantly sustained and reflected her intellectual and spiritual interests, Blanchard, in her meticulous portrayal of the world of educated 19th-century women, skillfully demonstrates how unexceptional her subject's life appeared within its heady environs. Similarly, her probably asexual relationship with Fields, seen by many as ``perhaps the classic `Boston marriage,' '' was unremarkable in an era of flowery ``romantic friendships'' between accomplished, independent women who rarely had the option of combining work and family. By the same token, Jewett's literary themes--notably the importance of community, a Transcendentalist reverence for nature, and a realism leavened by optimism--were addressed to and embraced by readers of both sexes. Persuasively argued, this spirited work falters only in its failure to measure Jewett's achievements against the best, rather than the whole, literature of her time. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0738208329
• ISBN 13: 9780738208329
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432