PEARL K. BELL
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old maid who believed in piety, progress, and propriety." The selec–
tion of her best work which Willa Cather had published in 1925 was
long out of print until a paperback edition appeared in 1956.
In recent swings of the
zeitgeist,
Sarah Orne Jewett has, not sur–
prisingly, been largely ignored by feminist critics, perhaps because
her aged widows and spinsters are so cheerfully satisfied with their
lot, and have nothing to rebel against. In any case, her devotion to
the past could hardly endear her to militant crusaders for a liberated
future. Perhaps the worst offense, on the part of academic critics, is
to pigeonhole Miss Jewett as a regional writer, as though her genius
was caged by geography. But neither Sarah Jewett nor Kate
Chopin, who also has been labelled "regional," limited their thoughts
or curiosity about human beings to the quaint and the picturesque,
as that label implies. Different as they were-the one a modern
woman before her time, the other a guardian of the past - they both
knew that the truth of art, while necessarily drawing its strength
from the writer's experience of a specific place in time, must also
transcend it. In this view ofliterature they were out of step with their
own age, but in the novelists of the century that began toward the
end of their lives , they would eventually be vindicated .
