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PARTISAN REVIEW
than I over the forsaken farmhouses which I see everywhere as I
drive about the country out of which I grew, and where every bush
and tree seem like my cousins. "
It was to the crumbling past that she gave her tenderest loyalty,
and her stories are filled with elderly widows and spinsters, with
superannuated sea captains, and aged farmers and fishermen strug–
gling to wrest a meager living from the hostile sea and the rocky New
England soil. For these ancient survivors she felt an admiring affec–
tion that she could not bestow on her contemporaries. In her
childhood she had accompanied her doctor father on his rounds of
the isolated farms and coastal villages , and she thoroughly absorbed
the speech, the eccentricities, the "elaborate conventionalities ," and
the sadness of a pastoral world drifting into anachronism. This lov–
ing intimacy became the lifeblood of her urge as a writer to hold that
pre-industrial existence alive, in memory, against the corruption of
time .
She found her cultural sustenance in the past as well . Her pas–
sionate faith in the harmony of man and nature , which meant
nothing to the booming industrial life of America after the Civil
War, was confirmed and nourished by her devotion to the tran–
scendental themes of Emerson and Thoreau. Throughout her ca–
reer , her work found a home in the
Atlantic,
which was owned and
for a time edited by James Fields, the publisher of the Concord
sages , of Longfellow and Hawthorne and Lowell and Holmes , in the
days when Boston's cultural eminence was not yet threatened by
upstart New York . And it was altogether fitting that Miss Jewett's
closest friend was the publisher's widow, Annie Fields, fifteen years
older than the young writer from Maine. At Mrs. Fields' tea parties
on Charles Street, Sarah Jewett came to know those aged literary
lions who were still drawing breath in the late decades of the cen–
tury. She knew little about the younger writers of her time, but ad–
mired Willa Cather, who became a good friend in the last year of
Miss Jewett's life, and it was very much in character that she worried
lest Willa Cather, then working in New York on
McClure's
magazine, lose touch with her Nebraska childhood , if she became
too involved in "the 'Bohemia' of newspaper and magazine-life ."
There was never the slightest danger that Sarah Orne Jewett
would lose touch with
her
roots , for they were all of what she was, the
strength of her belonging to one place and to a time older than her
own. As the lively old countrywoman Mrs . Fosdick complains in
The
Country
of
the Pointed Firs
(1896) , "I see so many of these new folks
