Tess and Brock dive into the unconventional life of Sarah Orne Jewett by first venturing to Berwick Academy, the school that Jewett attended. As an alum, Jewett was somewhat of a “patron saint”, and there are still students there who read and relate to her wild ways. At Jewett’s house, Tess and Brock are fascinated by her desk due to its unexpected position and discuss Jewett’s lover, Annie Fields.
Tess and Brock dive into the unconventional life of Sarah Orne Jewett by first venturing to Berwick Academy, the school that Jewett attended. As an alum, Jewett was somewhat of a “patron saint”, and there are still students there who read and relate to her wild ways. At Jewett’s house, Tess and Brock are fascinated by her desk due to its unexpected position and discuss Jewett’s lover, Annie Fields.
Marilyn Keith Daily, who works for Historic New England, shares that she became a Jewett fan after starting to work at Jewett’s house which proves that stepping foot in an author’s home can indeed encourage the need to read.
Mentioned:
The house:
Tess Chakkalakal is the creator, executive producer and host of Dead Writers. Brock Clarke is our writer and co-host.
Lisa Bartfai is the managing producer and executive editor. Our music is composed by Cedric Wilson, who also mixes the show. Ella Jones is our web editorial intern, and Mark Hoffman created our logo. A special thanks to our reader Colleen Doucette.
This episode was produced with the generous support of our sponsors Bath Savings and listeners like you.
TESS CHAKKALAKAL Literary houses are, like, the Disney Land of literature.
BROCK CLARKE I get the attraction of writers’ houses. It’s a thing you do when you’re extraordinarily bored. Is that thing you experience, though, when going to writers’ houses? Like, do you have the-the version—
TESS Do you know I-what my experience is, like “God, some of these writers were rich!”
[LAUGHTER]
BROCK This is Dead Writers, a show about great American authors and where they lived.
TESS I’m Tess Chakkalakal.
BROCK And I’m Brock Clarke.
TESS A decade ago, I became obsessed with saving Harriet Beecher Stowe’s house in Maine. And I did save it. And I’m still obsessed with literary houses—not just Stowe’s.
BROCK I wrote a novel called An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, because I couldn’t figure out why anyone goes to writers’ homes, let alone tries to save them.
TESS You’d think I’d hate Brock.
BROCK But you’re my colleague. You can’t hate me.
TESS It’s true. That would be awkward.
BROCK So instead of hating each other, we made this show.
COLLEEN DOUCETTE [READING SARAH ORNE JEWETT’S “A WHITE HERON”] “Sylvy, Sylvy!” called the busy old grandmother again and again, but nobody answered, and the small husk bed was empty and Sylvia had disappeared.The guest waked from a dream…”
WILLOW TURKEL So in my English class, we actually read a book by her called “The White Heron” [sic]. I thought it was a very interesting book, and I thought it was pretty reflective of her childhood.
TESS 16 year old Willow Turkel is a junior at Berwick Academy. That’s where she was assigned Sarah Orne Jewett’s short story “A White Heron".
COLLEEN DOUCETTE [READING CONT.] “paler than ever, and her worn old frock is torn and tattered, and smeared with pine pitch. The grandmother…”
WILLOW TURKEL And I think a lot of her other works definitely interest me too, because she was just, she pioneered her time. She was very inspirational and also kind of used a kind of childhood aspect towards her writing. Also to capture what she grew up in, in Maine, South Berwick, which was such a small town at the time.
TESS Berwick Academy, where Brock and I meet Willow, is in South Berwick, Maine. It’s the small town where Sarah Orne Jewett grew up and the academy is where she went to school. But that was almost 150 years ago. Jewett is not exactly a household name today, but she was a famous writer in her time. She was just 19 when she published her first story in the Atlantic Monthly in 1869. She went on to write many more short stories and novels and rub shoulders with all the literary big shots of her time— William Dean Howells, Charles Dickens, Willa Cather, to name just a few.
[MUSIC]
TESS The Berwick Academy campus is beautiful with manicured green lawns populated by well groomed students like Willow, who are sharing snacks in the halls and who look like they’ve earned a decisive victory in the battle against acne. The school has been around since 1791 and hasn’t changed all that much over the years. And it was very early in accepting girls among its five hundred students
BROCK Where are we? Where is she? What number?
MELISSA WILLIAMS I think she’s 14.
TESS And so, Mary Jewett is her sister, number 17.
TESS Melissa Williams, the archivist at the Academy, had laid out some old school photos for us to look at.
BROCK They’re kind of like bonneted, small faces
MELISSA WILLIAMS Yes.
TESS On a cold wintry day, it looks like.
MELISSA WILLIAMS Yeah
BROCK No kidding.
MELISSA WILLIAMS It's kind of striking though that, I mean that far back, that we do have a class photo of them all together.
TESS And how old would she have been in this photo?
MELISSA WILLIAMS That's a good question. Well, she began here at 12, so younger than that. And then this is a photo of her with her sister, Mary, and that's her father.
TESS And these are original prints that you have.
MELISSA WILLIAMS Yes, they are!
TESS Copies are very nice. So the father here looks pretty dour, or it looks like that coat's a little bit big on him.
[BROCK AND MELISSA WILLIAMS LAUGH]
TESS Needed a better tailor.
BROCK He's going to grow into it.
TESS I mean, he's the wealthiest dude. You think he’d have a better tailor.
[MELISSA WILLIAMS LAUGHS]
BROCK Who—so, which is Sarah Orne Jewett?
TESS The one standing?
BROCK The one who is standing?
MELISSA WILLIAMS Yeah, the one standing.
BROCK I like—how would you describe her expression, Tess?
TESS Well, she's looking down and almost—
BROCK A little judgey.
TESS Little judgey. Yeah. She definitely has some kind of superior—
BROCK Like, your sister has dandruff or something. I like that. That makes me her a whole lot.
TESS Jewett, unlike Willow, was a reluctant student. She preferred tooling around in the woods or riding her horses. But she still loved the Berwick Academy and stayed connected with it after she graduated.
MELISSA WILLIAMS This is an example of 1889 Sarah Orne Jewett judged a Christmas story contest for the students. Yes. And this is some record of that.
BROCK She seems like she was a good sport. Yeah,
MELISSA WILLIAMS Yeah,
TESS It's almost like she was a kind of—not just a patron, she's more than a patron. It's not about giving money. She's like—I was almost going to say a patron saint.
BROCK But that might be overstating it.
TESS Yeah, that's a bit too much
MELISSA WILLIAMS It does feel that way to some extent.
TESS Does it?
MELISSA WILLIAMS Yeah. Yeah, it does. And this is a piece of writing by an alum from the late 1800s, early 1900s. And she remembers Sarah coming and reading aloud at school frequently to them.
TESS Do you want to go ahead and read that?
MELISSA WILLIAMS Yeah, sure. So let's see where she…
TESS One day she read from Whittier? Is that where—?
MELISSA WILLIAMS Yeah. So let's see. [READING] “Mr. Stocking would allow us to assemble in the hall and listen to readings by Sarah Jewett. She was a natural reader. One day she read from Whittier ‘The Angels of Buena Vista’. She made the description so real, the sorrow and grief of the noble Mexican woman so vivid, that, to this day, I never read the poem without seeing Sarah standing before us, rich and Girlish beauty.
TESS Girlish beauty! Wow.
TESS The poem Jewett read was “The Angels of Buena Vista.” It’s about the Mexican War and describes the role women played in it But it wasn’t Jewett’s poems that made her famous. It was her short stories, including the one Willow likes best, “A White Heron.”
COLLEEN DOUCETTE [READING CONT.] “paler than ever, and her worn old frock is torn and tattered, and smeared with pine pitch. The grandmother and the sportsman stand in the door together and question her, and the splendid moment has come to speak of the dead hemlock-tree by the green marsh. But Sylvia does not speak after all…”
TESS It’s told mostly through the perspective of a young girl called Sylvia who meets a man, a bird hunter, who is looking for a rare white Heron in the Maine Woods. Let’s leave it to Willow to make sense of it.
WILLOW TURKEL They were looking for this bird called a white heron that didn't really come out. I don’t know. She only knew the location of the bird, and their mission that day was to go find it, so he could hunt it. But the girl did not want him to hunt it. So she purposefully misled him into a different spot in the woods.
BROCK And, maybe you like this, one of the things I like about Jewett especially is that the world seems mundane, ordinary, but all of this odd, unlikely, mysterious stuff goes on in it. So for instance, even the premise of, Hey, I'm out walking my cow, and a strange boy appears and he asks if I can come home with you. And she says yes. So that itself is a kind of unlikeliness, but it's all low key. None of it's fantastical at all, including the subterfuge, the sneakiness of aborting this hunt. I think that's pretty great.
WILLOW TURKEL Yeah, definitely. Like, parallel with my own childhood, I completely see myself as her. Not that I was secretive about where my things were, but I'd say it was more like the way she ventured out into nature and the way she had knowledge of these birds without needing to go to school for it, or, you know, she was only seven years old. So I just thought it was great that she had all that information. And also, I can mention that the guy in the book, he kind of mansplained to her about these birds. He's like, “Oh yeah, this bird makes this sound”. And she's like, “I already know this!”
COLLEEN DOUCETTE [READING SARAH ORNE JEWETT’S “A WHITE HERON”] “Has she been nine years growing, and now, when the great world for the first time puts out a hand to her, must she thrust it aside for a bird’s sake? The murmur of the pine’s green branches is in her ears, she remembers how the white heron came flying through the golden air and how they watched the sea and the morning together, and Sylvia cannot speak; she cannot tell the heron’s secret and give its life away.”
WILLOW TURKEL Just in my childhood, my sister and I spent most of our days outside. We were, like—we had a whole neighborhood group, and we would hang out every single day outside, whether it rained or snowed or any weather condition. We even made our own little restaurant out of wood planks in the woods.
BROCK What'd you serve?
[WILLOW TURKEL LAUGHS]
WILLOW TURKEL Mud pies.
BROCK There you go.
WILLOW TURKEL Yeah! They were great. But yeah, it's not necessarily the way I live, but it's how I relate to her, because I just feel like the way she writes it just—it's not childish, but it's that childhood ambition.
COLLEEN DOUCETTE [READING SARAH ORNE JEWETT’S “A WHITE HERON”] “Many a night Sylvia heard the echo of his whistle haunting the pasture path as she came home with the loitering cow. She forgot even her sorrow at the sharp report of his gun and the sight of thrushes and sparrows dropping silent to the ground, their songs hushed and their pretty feathers stained and wet with blood. Were the birds better friends than their hunter might have been…”
TESS Willow identified two of the main motivating factors of Jewett’s work and life. Firstly, the childhood ambition—not to lose her sense of playfulness. And secondly mansplaining—not to let a man’s idea of the world shape her life.
[MUSIC]
TESS Jewett’s is the only writer's home we’ve visited for this podcast where the author actually wrote. Most of the other homes in Maine were childhood homes, or places where the authors lived for a few years or even a few months. These people left for Boston, New York, or the Berkshires to establish themselves as writers. But not Jewett—well not entirely at least, but we’ll get back to that later on in the episode. Jewett lived and wrote in this very house, at this very desk.
TESS And this was her desk, Marilyn?
MARILYN KEITH DAILY This was Sarah Orne Jewett’s desk. It was her grandfather's desk.
TESS Marilyn Keith Daily works for Historic New England, the organization which owns and maintains Sarah Orne Jewett’s house in South Berwick. She’s giving us a special tour before the house opens for its busy summer season. We’ve stopped in front of a beautiful, dark wooden desk with lots of little drawers and picture frames stacked on top of it. There’s just one strange thing about it, and that’s the desk’s placement in the middle of a hallway right where you come up the stairs. Anyone who came in or out of one of the four bedrooms would have had to walk right by Jewett as she was writing.
TESS To me this feels very modern, like the—what are they called now? Open—? Google doesn't have any offices now. Everything’s—we don't do this at Bowdoin. We still have private offices…
BROCK Public workspace, like a workspace.
TESS Public workspace. It kind of feels like that to me. There's something sort of modern about it.
BROCK Yeah, it's like working in a coffee shop. You have a lot of things going on. I have a great image of her wearing enormous headphones.
TESS It’s not just the desk’s location inside the house that feels busy. From her desk, Jewett could look out over the busiest intersection in town. It’s still busy and full of traffic.
BROCK Right. So this is high traffic in both senses: in the house, people would be walking past; out the window, people would be—
MARILYN KEITH DAILY Although imagine, you can imagine the Jewett household was very much supportive of Jewett's writing, so I'm sure they would've been intentionally quiet. There was Mary Jewett. Her sister had a lot to do with Jewett's ability to have this freedom, you know, this life of freedom that she carved out for herself. And Mary ran the household and made sure that things ran properly.
TESS Jewett was determined to live an unconventional life for a woman in the 19th century, and to do it in her little hometown in Maine. Helping her realize this life as a woman writer were two other unconventional women. Her sister Mary who never married or had a family but took care of the practical stuff for Jewett and herself like the house and its staff. And Jewett’s lover, Annie Fields, who brought her into her Boston salon and made sure she had a seat at the table next to the most famous male writers of the time.
[MUSIC]
TESS You know the term Boston Marriage to refer to two women living together? That is supposedly from the Henry James’ novel The Bostonians where there are two characters modeled on Annie Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett living together, most likely as a romantic couple. Annie Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett kind of reminds me of Gertrude Stein, who in the roaring 1920s was hosting salons in Paris, discovering artists and writers like Picasso, F.Scott Fitzgerald, and Hemingway with her partner Alice B. Toklas. But Fields was doing all of that a generation or two earlier and in stodgy Boston, not gay Paris.
MARILYN KEITH DAILY she was beautiful. She was a brilliant hostess. She was hilarious, apparently, from all accounts and just the bright light of the Boston artistic society.
TESS Annie Fields was married to James T. Fields, Longfellow’s publisher and editor of the Atlantic Monthly. And the two of them, Annie and James, loved throwing parties for all their writer friends. Their house on 148 Charles Street became the place to see and be seen.
MARILYN KEITH DAILY Dickens is visiting Hawthorne and Longfellow, all of the names, Oliver Wendell Holmes, all the names of the day. She is also, though, recommending, as she's a reader, books by women, women authors. And Sarah Orne Jewett is one of the authors that she slides on his desk and says, “Take a look at this author”.
TESS So Fields had heard of Jewett and watched her fame grow. The two had met socially and knew of each other when Fields’ husband suddenly died.
MARILYN KEITH DAILY And Annie Fields withdraws from society for several months, and Sarah Orne Jewett pays a condolence call in the fall. And a condolence call at that time would've normally lasted about three weeks. She stays three months, and, essentially, they become a couple at that time. And she returns back home here to South Berwick the following spring. But they've already planned to go to Europe together for the summer. And she's essentially, essentially moves in half the year to Charles Street, and they're a couple there.
BROCK Incredible story. I mean, one of the things that really caught my ear is a three week condolence call. Oh my god, that would require another type of condolence.
MARILYN KEITH DAILY Right! Two weeks and six days too long, as I like to say.
[MUSIC]
TESS Jennifer Tuttle, who is, among other things, the Director of the Maine Women Writers Collection at the University of New England in Portland, has more than just theories about the relationship between Jewett and Fields. She also has letters.
JENNIFER TUTTLE I mean, when you read them you’ll see all the endearments. They also had, you know, nicknames for each other. So, Sarah was “Henny”, and Annie was “Fuf”. There's a letter again from the summer of ‘81, just a few months after James died, where Sarah addresses Annie as “My own dear darling”. And she's talking to her, trying to talk her through her grief. And there's some beautiful lines here, for example, where she's saying,
JENNIFER TUTTLE [READING] “Don't think about next summer, dear darling. Don't think about tomorrow even, but make the days grow lovelier one by one because you do the tasks God sets you as best you can. Don't say, my heart aches, and I am wretched, but say, I'm going to be happy by and bye and have my own again, and God is teaching me as I wait”
JENNIFER TUTTLE Right? I mean, that's beautiful. And so you can see the commitment that Sarah has to helping Annie work through the process, but she's already really expressing there's an intimacy of some type, a textual at least verbal intimacy, between them that you can see in these letters.
TESS The Special Collections at University of New England in Portland has a ton of Jewett’s personal letters. Some of these have been digitized, but most have not and they are all right here, in their original paper and ink, available for anyone who feels like reading them. It’s kind of amazing that paper and ink is so durable. You’d think this stuff would be more fragile, would have withered away and died, like the people who wrote them. But no, here the letters are, lovingly laid out for us to read by Jennifer.
BROCK Do their personalities come out as distinct in these letters? Like, in that one, that's clearly a, “Hey, don't be such a downer. Everything's going to be fine.”
JENNIFER TUTTLE It is. That is exactly what it is. And I would say, again, Annie is—I am not an expert on these letters, and I'm sure there are others who have studied them more closely, who could do a better job characterizing them. But Annie is warm and receptive and, occasionally, affectionate. Discloses more beyond the everyday chatty nature of life.
JENNIFER TUTTLE I mean, at the end of the life, I always caution myself and others against reading into—I simply mean that what's very cool about some of these letters is that they do provide some textual material that we can work with to really try to better understand how they spoke to each other, you know. And then where we take that is up to us.
TESS Researchers have used these very letters to strengthen their understanding of the relationship between Fields and Jewett and prove that it was deep and mutual. Both women were equally devoted to each other. It’s been the basis for a sort of corrective history that shines a light on same-sex love and the role such stories played in the making of American literature. It’s not just researchers who have access to the archive. Maine Women Writers Archive is open to the public. That’s hugely important to Jennifer. And why she and her colleagues worked so hard to fundraise and collect as much of Sarah Orne Jewett’s things from private owners where they can’t be read and studied broadly.
JENNIFER TUTTLE All these revelations about Sarah and Annie, for example, would never be known if we had not.
BROCK Yeah. I'm curious about the process. This is going to sound snarky, but I actually mean it sincerely because I don't know how it works. I noticed in here it's like a list of things including a purchase of wheat. And I'm wondering when you were like, “Okay, this is a wheat and chaff joke”, but when you're collecting things, and you want those correspondences, right? “All right, we'll take the thing. We'll take the receipt for wheat if we get these other things”. Or do you think now even the receipt for wheat might have some kind of importance sooner or later, we just don't know what it is yet. I'm just curious—
JENNIFER TUTTLE Well, yeah. I mean, that's the great thing about being in archives is our job, in part, is we do our best to imagine, use our imagination and our commitment to collect what we see as representative, as inclusive documentation of history, of trying to cover every conceivable aspect of Jewett. But, ultimately, it's the researcher's job to come in and make what they will of that.
TESS We continue our tour back at the Sarah Orne Jewett House in South Berwick. We walk into one of the doors that lead into the hallway where Jewett’s desk is. It’s on the smaller side. The walls are painted a calm, earthy sage green. A wooden sleigh bed takes up most of the floor space. And around the walls are smaller works of art, but also trinkets that Jewett collected throughout her life. A stuffed owl hanging from her mirror, a gift from a friend whose nickname for her was “Owl”. A baptismal mug she got as a baby still standing on the mantelpiece. And high up, almost all the way to the ceiling, are three plaques with life sized trout fish on them.
MARILYN KEITH DAILY There's a peaceful quality.
BROCK Yeah! Tess mentioned earlier that the trout part is something you'd see all over Maine. This kind of looks like a sportsman's room, which is interesting,
TESS Like a man cave.
BROCK Like a man cave! [LAUGHING] That’s not my term. That’s not my term. Yeah, go ahead.
MARILYN KEITH DAILY Or the room of a famous person who really craved privacy, who really needed to be in nature and have that…Her famous advice to Willa Cather, one of her famous pieces of advice was, “A quiet hour is more valuable to you”—and I'm totally paraphrasing—but “A quiet is—an hour spent in quiet is more valuable to you than any visit”, you know, or any other activity you could do as a writer.
BROCK Says the writer who put her desk…
MARILYN KEITH DAILY Right! Right, right.
BROCK Do you have a favorite book?
TESS We can’t help but ask everyone we meet at these literary houses if they’ve read anything by the author that lived there. So we ask Marilyn, too. Turns out she has, and she even has a favorite.
MARILYN KEITH DAILY Yeah, it is Country of the Pointed Firs, and it's a remarkable, transcendent work. And it really is an example of an artist really at their peak.
BROCK Country of the Pointed Firs is Jewett’s 1896 novel, in which an author moved to a Maine island to write for the summer only to find herself distracted by the island residents—their cockeyed sensibilities, their ingenuity, their oddball way of living through tragedies, and occasional triumphs. The Country of the Pointed Firs, it's interesting. First, it's interesting because you have an author figure who kind of wants to remain anonymous but then kind of doesn't want to remain anonymous. And then she gets wrapped up in this community, which sounds a lot like the community the writer who wrote the book had waiting for her at home. Does that make sense at all? I mean, talk about autofiction. She’s more contemporary than some of our contemporary writers.
MARILYN KEITH DAILY Yeah, and it’s at once slightly humorous—the writer who's come to this place to write is immediately distracted by this very friendly and warm herbalist who's just full of life and really draws her into the stories. And it's the stories of this Dunnet Landing that really draw her in the traditions, these rights, you know, the family reunion, and the marching funeral.
BROCK Were you a fan before starting to work at the house?
MARILYN KEITH DAILY You know what? I was not. I wasn't a non-fan. I had read very little of her. I think like most—I had read a little in college. But when I started this position, I delved into her work, and I was quickly a fan.
BROCK As a writer, that's heartening—I'm the writer in this formulation—that you would go to a house and that would make you want to read the writer's books, rather than just say, “That was a cool house” and then move on.
MARILYN KEITH DAILY Well, I will say and our guide staff remark about this often, and we have to reorder and reorder during the season. So people often come to this house, and this sounds a little bit like I'm advertising but this is the truth, they often come to the house and, “No, I think I read a story of hers in college. I'm not sure.” And then they leave, and they want to buy a book. And I think that her essence in this house, the inspiration is, is, inspires people.
TESS There it is. The thing that bugs Brock. Why do we need the houses? Aren’t the books enough? Actually, if I’m honest. This is what we’ve both been waiting for and the reason we decided to do this podcast. A real writer's home. A literary house that makes people want to read! Ladies and Gentlemen, we have arrived. Thanks for listening.
COLLEEN DOUCETTE [READING CONT.] “Whatever treasures were lost to her, woodlands and summer-time, remember! Bring your gifts and graces and tell your secrets to this lonely country child!”
TESS You have listened to Dead Writers with me, TESS CHAKKALAKAL.
BROCK And me, BROCK CLARKE. Our managing producer and editor is Lisa Bartfai.
TESS Cedric Wilson has created our theme music and mixed the show.
BROCK Ella Jones is our web editorial intern. Thanks for listening.
TESS And a very special thanks to our generous sponsors, Bath Savings, and listeners like you.
BROCK You can find more information about the writers, their books, and their houses at our website on MainePublic.org. Thanks for listening.