ABSTRACT
Descending on both sides from pre-Revolution families, Sarah Orne Jewett was the second of three daughters born to Theodore Herman and Caroline Frances Perry Jewett on September 3, 1849. Although Jewett hoped to become a doctor like her father, poor health prevented her from achieving that goal. Although she later attended Miss Raynes’s School and graduated from the Berwick Academy in 1865, Jewett admitted that her best education came from the numerous trips she took with her father. In the early 1880s when James T. Fields, the Boston publisher, died, Jewett’s relationship with Fields’s wife, Annie, developed into what became known as a “Boston marriage.” In 1901, Jewett received an honorary doctorate from Bowdoin College, the first woman ever to be recognized in such fashion by Bowdoin. Jewett’s writing career came to an end in 1902 when she fell from her carriage on her fifty-third birthday.
