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PARTISAN REVIEW
Pointed Firs:
"She had never seen anybody so charming and delight–
ful; the woman's heart, asleep in the child, was vaguely thrilled by a
dream oflove." It is not surprising that in reading
Madame Bovary
she
was struck not by Emma's sexual romanticism but by her rejection of
the natural community to which she belonged . As Miss Jewett wrote
to Annie Fields, Emma Bovary "is such a lesson to dwellers in coun–
try towns, who drift out of relation to their surroundings, not only
social, but the very companionship of nature, unknown to them."
She wrote one more book,
The Tory Lover
(1901), after
The
Country of the Pointed Firs,
but she was working against her grain in
this romantic story about John Paul Jones in Berwick during the
Revolution. A year later, at the age of fifty-four, she was violently
thrown from her carriage when the horse stumbled, and seriously in–
jured her head and spine. Though she lingered on for seven invalid
years, she wrote no more .
In her lifetime Sarah Jewett was praised and cossetted as a
perfect darling by such titans of literary Boston as Lowell and
Holmes. But it was typical of Lowell's lofty astigmatism that he
especially approved of her decision , as he put it, "to work within nar–
row limitations ," and left it at that. As her books appeared, the
reviewers almost invariably praised the perfection of her style, the
purity of her language, her sweet and ladylike refinement and her
humor. In her own day only Howells seems to have discerned how
much she drew from "the very tint and form of reality ," but he did
not grasp what that aged reality meant to her, and how thoroughly,
however uninsistently , she diverged from the literary givens of the
time .
Sarah Jewett's work never suffered the brutal extinction meted
out to Kate Chopin , but in the early years of the new century she
was read mainly by those whose heads, like hers, were "full of old
women and old houses," and their number was dwindling. Some of
her stories have been standard models of stylistic perfection in school
anthologies, and a few years after her death she was dubiously hon–
ored by Henry James in an "appreciation" so snarled in knots and
tangles of circumlocutory wool that the one strand of unembarrassed
lucidity can easily be overlooked : she had, James wrote, "a sort of
elegance of humility." In the 1930s the influential left-wing critics
had as little use for Sarah Orne Jewett as they did for Emily Post.
v .
L. Parrington called her a "bleached-out Brahmin ," and Gran–
ville Hicks contemptuously dismissed her as "merely a New England
