Sarah Orne Jewett is known primarily for The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), her masterpiece about coastal and rural Maine, and for a number of well-crafted short stories exploring similar regional settings, characters, and customs. Because she focuses on details about ordinary people living in a specific locale, she is sometimes classified as a literary realist, a label disputed by others who note, for instance, her frequent use of personal viewpoints as opposed to the slice-of-life objectivity practiced by the major literary realists. Realist or not, Jewett is the greatest of the women regionalists who were forming a literary tradition of their own in nineteenth-century America, and she is generally recognized today, according to her biographer, “as an unsurpassed chronicler and interpreter of women’s lives” (Blanchard, xvi).
Born in South Berwick, Maine, Jewett had...
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Citation: Nichols, Kathleen L.. "Sarah Orne Jewett". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 July 2008 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2367, accessed 09 June 2026.]
