"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 1836, the murder of a young prostitute made headlines in New York City and around the country, inaugurating a sex-and-death sensationalism in news reporting that haunts us today. Patricia Cline Cohen goes behind these first lurid accounts to reconstruct the story of the mysterious victim, Helen Jewett. From her beginnings as a servant girl in Maine, Helen Jewett refashioned herself, using four successive aliases, into a highly paid courtesan. She invented life stories for herself that helped her build a sympathetic clientele among New York City's elite, and she further captivated her customers through her seductive letters, which mixed elements of traditional feminine demureness with sexual boldness. But she was to meet her match--and her nemesis--in a youth called Richard Robinson. He was one of an unprecedented number of young men who flooded into America's burgeoning cities in the 1830s to satisfy the new business society's seemingly infinite need for clerks. The son of an established Connecticut family, he was intense, arrogant, and given to posturing. He became Helen Jewett's lover in a tempestuous affair and ten months later was arrested for her murder. He stood trial in a five-day courtroom drama that ended with his acquittal amid the cheers of hundreds of fellow clerks and other spectators. With no conviction for murder, nor closure of any sort, the case continued to tantalize the public, even though Richard Robinson disappeared from view. Through the Erie Canal, down the Ohio and the Mississippi, and by way of New Orleans, he reached the wilds of Texas and a new life under a new name. Through her meticulous and ingenious research, Patricia Cline Cohen traces his life there and the many twists and turns of the lingering mystery of the murder. Her stunning portrayals of Helen Jewett, Robinson, and their raffish, colorful nineteenth-century world make vivid a frenetic city life and sexual morality whose complexities, contradictions, and concerns resonate with those of our own time.

An unprecedented literary landmark: the first comprehensive history of American women writers from 1650 to the present. In a narrative of immense scope and fascination, here are more than 250 female writers, including the famous—Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dorothy Parker, Flannery O’Connor, and Toni Morrison, among others—and the little known, from the early American bestselling novelist Catherine Sedgwick to the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Susan Glaspell. Showalter integrates women’s contributions into our nation’s literary heritage with brilliance and flair, making the case for the unfairly overlooked and putting the overrated firmly in their place.

A sharply observed, affectionate, and unsentimental portrait of life in a Maine fishing village, The Country of the Pointed Firs is Sarah Orne Jewett’s most enduring work, and commonly regarded as the finest example of American regionalist literature in the nineteenth century. It was originally published in four installments of the Atlantic Monthly in 1896; this Broadview Edition is based on the Atlantic serialization and also includes the four other stories set in Dunnet Landing. The critical introduction situates the text in its historical, cultural, and literary milieu, attending to its place in Jewett’s oeuvre and in her biography. Appendices include earlier “local color” writing by Jewett and others, Jewett’s letters, and contemporary reviews of the novel.

For too long Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) was dismissed as a timid New England local colorist, known principally for her novels and short stories based in her native state of Maine. But in addition to her fiction, she also wrote poetry, plays, and essays. She enjoyed an extensive acquaintance with most of the established writers of her time and was on friendly terms with many lesser-known women of her era. With the publication of a selection of her letters in 1956, scholarly books and articles soon followed. And with the advent of the women's movement came a renewal of interest in Jewett's life and writings. She is now recognized as a uniquely sharp, compassionate observer of women and their lives in 19th-century New England. Included in this reference book are alphabetically arranged entries for Jewett's writings, characters, family members, friends, acquaintances, and professional associates and admirers. Entries on the most important works and persons include brief bibliographies. The volume begins with a concise introductory essay, and a chronology highlights the chief events in Jewett's life and career. The book closes with a general bibliography of works about Jewett. Given Jewett's complex characterizations and her subtle crafting of plots and settings, this book will be a valuable guide both for those approaching Jewett's works for the first time and for more advanced readers.