"This collection represents an appreciation of Sarah Orne Jewett in every sense of the word. It both grasps the nature, worth, and quality of Jewett's oeuvre and judges it with heightened perception and candor."--Mary Lowe-Evans, University of West Florida Essays about identity and difference, tradition and transformation, region and nation add an energetic and diverse set of voices to current discussions about Sarah Orne Jewett, 19th-century American women's writing, and the reshaping of the literary canon. Contents "Confronting Time and Change": Jewett, Region, and Nation, by Karen L. Kilcup and Thomas Edwards I. Contexts: Readers and Reading 1. Sex, Class, and Category Crisis: Jewett and the Postmodern Reader, by Marjorie Pryse 2. "In Search of Local Color": Context, Controversy, and The Country of the Pointed Firs,, by Donna Campbell 3. "Links of Similitude": The Narrator of The Country of the Pointed Firs and Author-Reader Relations at the End of the 19th Century, by Melissa Homestead 4. "To Make Them Acquainted with One Another": Jewett, Howells, and the Dual Aesthetic of Deephaven, by Paul Petrie II. Contemporaries: Jewett and the Writing World 5. Challenge and Compliance: Textual Strategies in A Country Doctor and 19th-Century American Women's Medical Autobiographies, by Judith Wittenberg 6. Transcendentalism to Ecofeminism: Celia Thaxter and Sarah Orne Jewett's Island Views Revisited, by Marcia Littenberg 7. The Professor and the Pointed Firs: Cather, Jewett, and the Problem of Editing, by Ann Romines 8. Visions of New England: The Anxiety of Jewett's Influence on Ethan Frome, by Priscilla Leder III. Conflicts: Identity and Ideology 9. Whiteness as Loss in Sarah Orne Jewett's "The Foreigner," by Mitzi Schrag 10. "How Clearly the Gradations of Society Were Defined": Negotiating Class in Sarah Orne Jewett, by Alison Easton 11. Purity and Danger: Gender and Class in Jewett's "The Best China Saucer," by Sarah Way Sherman IV. Connections: Jewett's Time and Place 12. "A Brave Happiness": Rites and Celebrations in Jewett's Ordered Past, by Graham Frater 13. We Do Not All Go Two by Two; Or, Abandoning the Ark, by Patti Capel Swartz 14. Jewett's Maine: A Journey Back, by Carol Schachinger Karen L. Kilcup is associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her recent publications include Robert Frost and Feminine Literary Tradition, Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: An Anthology, Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A Critical Reader, and Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition. Thomas S. Edwards, associate academic dean at Castleton State College in Vermont, has published in the areas of 19th- and 20th-century social and literary history, popular culture, and literary translation.

In her book Sarah Orne Jewett: Reconstructing Gender, Margaret Roman argues that one theme colors almost every short story and novel by the turn-of-the-century American author: each person, regardless of sex, must break free of the restrictive, polar-opposite norms of behavior traditionally assigned to men and women by a patriarchal society. That society, as seen from Jewett’s perspective during the late Victorian era, was one in which a competitive, active man dominates a passive, emotional woman. Frequently referring to Jewett’s own New England upbringing at the hands of an unusually progressive father, Roman demonstrates how the writer, through her personal quest for freedom and through the various characters she created, strove to eliminate the necessity for rigid and narrowly defined male-female roles and relationships. With the details of Jewett’s free-spirited life, Roman’s book represents a solid work of literary scholarship, which traces a gender-dissolving theme throughout Jewett’s writing. Whereas previous critics have focused primarily on her best-known works, including “A White Heron,” Deephaven, A Country Doctor, and The Country of the Pointed Firs, Roman encompasses within her own discussion virtually all of the stories found in the nineteen volumes Jewett published during her lifetime. And although much recent criticism has centered around Jewett’s strong female characters, Roman is the first to explore in depth Jewett’s male characters and married couples. The book progresses through distinct phases that roughly correspond to Jewett’s psychological development as a writer. In general, the characters in her early works exhibit one of two modes of behavior. Youngsters, free as Jewett was to explore the natural world of woods and field, glimpse the possibility of escape from the confining standards that society has set, though some experience turbulent and confusing adolescences where those norms have become more pressing, more demanding. At the opposite extreme are those who have mindlessly accepted the roles in which they have been trapped since youth—greedy, selfish men, dutiful women who tend emotionally empty houses, young couples unable to communicate either between themselves or with others—in short, characters who are too alienated within their roles to function as whole human beings. On the other hand, Jewett approaches the men and women of her later works with a higher degree of optimism, in that each person is free to live according to the dictates of his or her inherent personality—each character is able to measure life from within rather than from without. This group includes the self-confident men who are not reluctant to present a nurturing side, and the warm, giving women who are unafraid of displaying a decided inner strength. As Roman summarizes, “In her writings, Jewett attempts to shift society’s focus from a grasping power over people to the personal development of each member of society.” Ahead of her time in many ways, Sarah Orne Jewett confronted the Victorian polarized gender system, presaging the modern view that men and women should be encouraged to develop along whatever paths are most comfortable and most natural for them.