Tales of New England.
Jewett To James
Jewett, Sarah Orne. Tales of New England. London: James R. Osgood, McIlvaine & Co., 1893.
8vo.; endpapers lightly offset; green cloth decoratively stamped in gilt; spine browned; a lovely copy.
First English edition; preceded by the American edition in 1890: BAL 10934. An endearing literary association copy, inscribed by Jewett: "To Henry James/ These old stories/ from his friend the writer."
Short story writer and novelist Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) was born and raised in South Berwick, Maine, the daughter of a country doctor. Financially secure enough that she was not compelled to marry, Jewett seriously considered studying medicine before she ultimately chose a writing career. Inspired by the powerful regionalist writing of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Jewett determined to devote herself to portrayal of “the life of the dwindling farms and deserted, shipless harbors” of New England. She published her first story in The Atlantic Monthly, at the age of 19, and in 1873 the first of her series of Deephaven stories followed. This series, collected in 1877, established Jewett’s reputation. Though she received most of her critical attention over twenty years later for The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), a series of stories of a Maine seaport town, throughout her career Jewett held her readership with her keenly sympathetic attention to the details of rural New England life, displayed in several collections of short stories, including Tales of New England; a collection of poems; three children’s books; an historical romance; and two novels, which explore strong female protagonists: A Country Doctor (1884), a vaguely autobiographical work about a woman who chooses a medical career over marriage; and A Marsh Island (1885), which portrays the inter-class romance of a New England farmer’s daughter. Of these, the only titles listed in Edel and Tintner’s inventory of James’s library are this copy of Tales of New England and a copy of A White Heron and Other Stories, signed by James.
Jewett, who had long admired Henry James’s work, finally met the Master through Annie Fields, the widow of The Atlantic publisher James T. Fields. Fields had promoted both James and Jewett in their youths, and Mrs. Fields, who had invited a very young James to one of her Charles Street salons, also befriended Jewett and the two remained lifelong intimates. In 1898 Fields brought Jewett to visit James at Lamb House, his home in Rye, Sussex–this inscription likely commemorates that visit. As Fields later described the meeting, James expressed admiration for the “elegance and exactness” of Jewett’s writing, saying that it was “absolutely true–not a word overdone” (quoted by Leon Edel in Henry James: A Life, NY: Harper & Row, 1985, p. 470). He would later comment on the strain of “sentimentality” in Jewett’s writing, In a letter to Sarah Wister (December 21, 1902), and on his distaste for Jewett’s longer works. To William Dean Howells, James wrote on January 25th, 1902:
The little American tale-tellers (I mean the two or three women) become impossible to me the moment they lengthen…and dear Sarah Jewett sent me not long since a Revolutionary Romance [The Tory Lover], with officers over their wine etc., and Paul Jones terrorizing the sea, that was a thing to make the angels weep. You wrote me of some inky maiden in the West, I think, who was superseding these ladies, but I watch for her in vain, and beg you to direct her to me…
That “inky maiden” was Willa Cather, who, in her memoir, speaks of the inspiration Jewett provided her. Ironically, James inevitably met Cather through his connection with Jewett, not Howells.
Little correspondence between James and Jewett remains–when Fields solicited Jewett’s letters to James from him, he claimed that there hadn’t been many, and that he had destroyed those few:
I find our admirable friend’s occasional communications have submitted to the law that I have made tole
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