“The tree seemed to lengthen itself out as she went up, and to reach farther and farther upward. It was like a great main-mast to the voyaging earth; it must truly have been amazed that morning through all its ponderous frame as it felt this determined spark of human spirit creeping and climbing from higher branch to branch.”
Sarah Orne Jewett is one of those great American writers who enjoyed broad popularity while alive but whose name has fallen off the dwindlingly short list of classic writers with modern day recognition. This says more about the tenor of modern modes of entertainment than it does about the quality of her writing. Along with friend and contemporary Mary Wilkins Freeman (a recording of her story “Shadows on the Wall” can be found here), Jewett was published regularly by The Atlantic and Harper’s and under myriad regional mastheads across the country.
The focus of Jewett’s entire life, personal and professional, rested in New England. She was raised in New Berwick, Maine, on a family property that situated her childhood home right next door to her grandparents. As a girl, she accompanied her father, a local doctor, on his rounds to visit patients in town and on the neighboring farms, and her life remained comfortably bound to the rhythms of her birth county.
It is perhaps this tightly woven connection to family and land that gave Jewett her evident sense of intimacy with her stories and the characters they protected, which was sometimes at odds with the commercial necessity of her profession. In a letter to Anne Fields, she expressed, “Sometimes, the business part of writing grows very noxious to me… It seems as bad as selling our fellow beings.” She was nonetheless quite good at “the business part.”
It is perhaps this instinct towards cloistering that influenced Jewett’s prose, which is delicate yet confident. What is clear, however, is that this leaning was hardly one which encouraged the musty staleness of a lifeforce kept enclosed. Quite the opposite, for her view of the world, expressed through the language and action of “A White Heron,” the well-loved and much anthologized short story, is inviting and fresh.
In this story—some even describe it as a fairy tale of sorts—she lets us in to the inner world and budding complexities of Sylvia, a spirited, adventurous young girl who knows the forest just beyond her grandmother’s house like the back of her hand. It is the center of her universe, and we bear witness to the first opportunity she has to confront the rather adult considerations of loyalty and stewardship.
In a letter written to Willa Cather in 1908, Jewett advised the aspiring writer to “find your own quiet centre of life, and write from that to the world.” She goes on to insist that, absent such centering, “strength in a writer is only crudeness, and what might be insight is only observation; sentiment falls to sentimentality.”
“A White Heron” is the embodiment of Jewett’s sagacity. From its quiet center explodes a strength, consciousness, and humanity that is entirely unsentimental.
Please enjoy…
Headline Image: Twilight | Hale Woodruff, c. 1926]
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