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…

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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 19 March 2024.]

2367 Sarah Orne Jewett 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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