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Authors
Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909)
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There is no collected edition of Jewett’s writings. Jewett’s Stories and Tales were published in seven volumes in 1910; but a more readily available collection, The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (1925), was edited in two volumes with a foreword by Willa Cather. Richard Cary edited The Uncollected Short Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (1971). Cary also edited Sarah Orne Jewett Letters (1967). The Library of America’s edition of Jewett’s Novels and Stories (1994), selected and with notes by Michael Davitt Bell, provides three novels and some thirty stories and is available in paperback. An informative, feminist life of Jewett by an eminent biographer, Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and Her Work by Paula Blanchard (2002) has drawn generated attention to Jewett’s complexities. A good introductory study is Josephine Donovan’s Sarah Orne Jewett (1980). More recently, Perry D. Westbrook’s Acres of Flint: Sarah Orne Jewett and Her Contemporaries (1981), Louis A. Renza’s “A White Heron” and The Question of Minor Literature and Sarah Way Sherman’s Sarah Orne Jewett: An American Persephone (1989) have clarified and complicatedour understanding of Jewett as have Marilyn Sanders Mobley’s Folk Roots and Mythic Wings in Sarah Orne Jewett and Toni Morrison: The Cultural Functions of Narrative (1991), Joseph Church’s Transcendent Daughters in Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs (1995), and Margaret Roman’s Sarah Orne Jewett: Reconstructing Gender (1997). Karen L. Kilcup and Thomas S. Edwards edited Jewett and Her Contemporaries: Reshaping the Canon (1999), fourteen essays on Jewett, nineteenthcentury women’s writing and new canon formation. A Sarah Orne Jewett Companion, edited by Robert L. Gale (1999) is of hellp, and the comparative study Conscience and Purpose: Fiction and Social Consciousness in Howells, Jewett, Chesnutt, and Cather by Paul R. Petrie (2005) supplies comparisons and contexts. Gwen L. Nagel’s still-useful Critical Essays on Sarah Orne Jewett (1984) offers a rich selection of material. An intriguing recent reading of “A White Heron” is “Romantic Flight in Jewett’s ‘White Heron’ ” by Joseph Church, Studies in American Fiction (2002).
Sarah Orne Jewett was a regional writer who grew up in the coastal town of South Berwick, Maine. Her father was a country doctor who allowed his daughter to accompany him on his rounds; many of the rural people Jewett encountered inspired her later fiction. In 1869 one of Jewett's first stories was accepted for publication in the Atlantic Monthly by William Dean Howells. With Howells's encouragement, Jewett continued to craft tales about the rural inhabitants of "Deephaven," a fictional town based on the bygone days of South Berwick. Strong women populated her rural tales, and strong women comprised her friends in the artistic circles of Boston in the 1870s; Annie Adams Fields, wife of the late publisher James T. Fields, would be her closest companion from 1881 until her death. Jewett's works include A Country Doctor (1884), A White Heron (1886), and her classic Country of the Pointed Firs (1896).
Questions for Discussion and Writing
Compared to the NAAL stories by James and Wharton, Jewett's A White Heron (1886) has such a simple plot that it might suggest a children's story. A quiet young girl, raised in the country and happy alone in nature, declines to tell a hunter how to find the nest of a white heron. The way the story is told, however, makes it a remarkable and even experimental work of American regionalism and realism.
1. The pine tree, heron, and other living things in A White Heron seem to have symbolic or even mystical importance. How can such elements be understood and valued in the context of a "realistic" tale? Who attributes symbolic power to these natural presences? What do those values tell us about Sylvia's consciousness?
2. Sylvia is interested in the "young sportsman": he appeals to "the woman's heart, asleep in the child." How does this attraction complicate and enrich the story?
3. Following Sylvia's lead as an interpreter of worldly experience, can we speculate about symbolic or even allegorical echoes in Jewett's tale? Does it make sense to read this story as "about" innocence, awakening sexuality, or the joys and sacrifices that come with interacting with the human world?
