Literary Birthday – 3 September – Sarah Orne Jewett

Sarah Orne Jewett  was born on3 September 1849 and died on 24 June 1909.

Sarah Orne Jewett Quotes

1. Find your quiet centre of life and write from that to the world.
2. It was mortifying to find how strong the habit of idle speech may become in one’s self. One need not always be saying something in this noisy world.
3. Tact is after all a kind of mind-reading.
4. It seems to me like stealing, for men and women to live in the world and do nothing to make it better.
5. The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper – whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.
6. The secret to happiness in this world is not only to be useful, but to be forever elevating one’s uses.

Sarah Orne Jewett was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet. She is best known for her regional fiction about life in Maine. Jewett wrote novels, stories, vignettes, and books for children. Her best-known work, The Country of the Pointed Firs, portrays the isolation and loneliness of a declining seaport town and captures the distinctive humour of its people. Her collected poems were published after her death as Verses.

Image: Encyclopædia Britannica, From Tales of New England by Sarah Orne Jewett, 1894.

by Amanda Patterson
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