Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett - Softcover

In her introduction to these short stories (many out of print for decades), Josephine Donovan explains that Sarah Ome Jewett is a product of two schools: "local colorists" like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Rose Terry Cooke, and the European realists, such as Flaubert and Thackeray, among others. Yet to read these marvelous stories is not to study archaic styles but to transport oneself to another time and place, an age of gentility and serenity that no longer exists. Jewett is first and foremost an extraordinary storyteller, and each of these stories is a multi-faceted jewel to be held up to the light and enjoyed. In "Tom's Husband," for example, where the woman in the story assumes the responsibility of running a business, the emphasis is on a gentle irony: "It seems to me that it is something like women's [sic] smoking: It isn't wicked, but it isn't the custom of the country." This sly, tongue-in-cheek humor replaces what could well have been an angry feminist dialectic. "Me King of Folly Island," on the other hand, presents a weak heroine ruled by a stubborn and proud father; Jewett recognizes the reality of existing sexual mores while, simultaneously, questioning their inherent validity. Maintaining an authoritative dignity for her characters, she allows them to examine the intricacies of daily life honestly and unselfconsciously. The seventeen stories in this collection are important for a number of reasons. Most significantly, they present the work of an intelligent and perceptive writer, a woman who is able to capture the essence of an entire age. "Mere was something about the look of the crimson silk shawl in the front yard to make one suspect that the sober customs of the best house in a quiet New England village were all being set at defiance, and once when the mistress of the house came to stand in her own doorway, she wore the pleased but somewhat apprehensive look of a guest." This ability to place a simple gesture in a broader cultural context is rare in itself, and to speak with such subtle eloquence and power is the mark of a true artist. Sarah Ome Jewett deserves to be ranked as one of the great writers of American literature. -- From Independent Publisher

There is "no shilly-shallying," as the author might put it, in this collection by Jewett (1849-1909), the admired New England writer who advised Willa Cather, "Write it as it is, don't try to make it like this or that. You can't do it in anybody else's wayyou will have to make a way of your own." Jewett's way, radiantly evident in these 17 stories, is to observe the verities of New England country life in implicit contrast to an encroaching industrial society. Never the sentimentalist, Jewett also exposes, but gently, the conceits and complacencies of provincial existence, as when elderly sisters in a Maine village whose "mother's social position was one of superior altitude" adorn themselves with foolish new hairpieces in "The Dulham Ladies." Her evocation of the natural world is superbly sensitive; equally impressive is her nose for human detail. Jewett was a master whose work (three novels and several collections of stories) Cather rightly called "almost flawless." Illustrations not seen by PW.
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