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Sarah Orne Jewett

Sarah Orne Jewett Spends the Night in the White Mountains

Sarah Orne Jewett traveled in 19th-century international literary circles, but it was the White Mountains, the ocean and the people of her native New England that inspired her. She was an early feminist writer whose masterpiece, The Country of the Pointed Firs, described provincial life in southern Maine.

Jewett viewed the world through the lens of Romanticism, which celebrated the picturesque life of common folk and the sublimity of nature. Awe was an emotion to be cultivated, especially in the presence of majestic landscapes. Her description of her trip to the mountains reveals her visionary union with nature.

Mount Washington from Sunset Hill by Benjamin Champney

In the summer of 1872, she was 22 years old and had already been published in The Atlantic Monthly. She wrote about the otherworldly experience of climbing Mount Washington in New Hampshire in her Aug. 8, 1872 journal entry.

“I may travel to the ends of the earth and see more wonderful things than I have ever dreamed of now, but one thing is certain: I never shall be standing on the top of a mountain for the first time again!” she wrote. She had just come home from her first visit to the “White Hills,” and spent one night and part of the next day on Mount Washington.

Sarah Orne Jewett

Sarah Orne Jewett was born in South Berwick, Maine on Sept. 3, 1849, the granddaughter of a sea captain and the daughter of a well-to-do country doctor. She spent about half of her adult life in South Berwick. The other half she spent traveling in Europe and in Boston’s literary circles, notably at the salon of James T. Fields and his wife Annie Fields.

Sophisticated and worldly, but never lost touch with her village, her roots as a country doctor’s daughter or her natural surroundings.

She introduced her readers to the traditions of Southern Maine. Critics more recently recognized her as a feminist chronicler of women’s lives. She wrote about independent women, mostly single like herself. They supported themselves by the means available to them in the 19th-century countryside.

Jewett wrote short stories, poems, novels and children’s books during her lifetime. She made her reputation in her mid-40s with The Country of Pointed Firs.

The White Mountains

Sarah Orne Jewett

Her account of her visit to the mountains reveals an adventurous spirit and a romantic sensibility.

“I can understand people’s being afraid of the mountains and imagining them gods themselves, or peopled with creatures not of this earth,” she wrote. “It did not seem as if I were in the world I had been born and brought up in.”

What had become of all the houses and the people and the climbing and pushing and falling and laughing and crying? It had all been taken away for a while, there were rocks and clouds — and the hills were alive.

She then compared the mountains to huge giants crouching there asleep. They waited “for the day when they are to rise up and march away with their bowed heads lifted, chanting with their great voices, with Mt Washington for the captain, a grand and solemn and stately procession.”

A Religious Experience

She wondered if the mountains meant as much to everyone else as they did to her. “Their strength teaches me what God’s strength is like,” she wrote. “[A]nd the wonderfulness of them grows greater and greater to me.”

As they climbed the mountain, she kept thinking of the Psalms. “It was so good to “lift my eyes unto the hills,” she wrote. “I thought most of the Psalm which begins “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.”

Then she wrote of her fear to “ascend into the hill of the Lord.” Her hands, she wrote, were soiled with the wicked things she had done. Her heart was far from pure.

“Somehow I could not help taking it literally, for there was the hill of the Lords and there was I — And when I said it over and over again to myself and came to the last verses, I could not believe anything else but that these were the very gates and that the King of Glory was coming very soon.”

This story was updated in 2021.

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Celia Thaxter: ‘So Still and Heavenly and Fresh and Full of Promise’

Celia Thaxter found solace, friendship and fame on the Isles of Shoals, a tiny archipelago off the coast of New Hampshire and Maine. She had grown up on one of the larger islands, White, the daughter of a lighthouse keeper. Her poems and stories about the island captivated her readers. And her island garden, which contained 57 flowers, inspired her artist friends.

Celia Thaxter around 1880

A letter to her friend Rose Lamb on August 29, 1889, typifies her island-inspired prose.

To-night there is the most delicious slender red crescent sinking slowly in the west, throwing a mysterious glimmer on the calm sea; there isn’t a whisper of wind, and it is balmy and beautiful; windows and doors all open; a most heavenly night. Now people begin to come and I must stop.

Celia Thaxter, Early Life

She was born Celia Laighton on June 29, 1835, in Portsmouth, N.H. Her father, Thomas Laighton, was appointed lighthouse keeper on White Island. Celia only had her two brothers, Cedric and Oscar, to play with. Of her island life, she once wrote,

One of the first things a settler on the Isles of Shoals has to learn is to live as independently as possible.

White and Seavey islands

At 16, she married her tutor, Levi Thaxter, a Harvard graduate 11 years her senior. He had come to the islands hoping to make money from the hotel Thomas Laighton was building on Appledore Island. Soon he tired of island life and persuaded Celia to move to the mainland.

They moved to Newtonville, Mass., and immersed themselves in Boston’s literary circles. At 17 Celia gave birth to her son Karl, who was injured during delivery. He was bright, but nervous, temperamental and dependent. Soon she gave birth to another son, John, and then her youngest, Roland, who became a prominent mycologist.

Celia Thaxter house in Newtonville

Levi took the boys on long hunting trips, which Celia resented. She also hated living in Newtonville. She called her home ‘a household jail’ and complained of the ‘hideous ironing. ..the trinity of the soapkettle, the ashcan and the cookstove.’ She wrote a poem called Landlocked, which Levi discovered and took to publisher James T. Fields. He published the poem, and many others by Celia, in the Atlantic. Celia became friends with his wife, Annie Adams Fields, who ran a literary salon on Beacon Hill.

Back to Appledore

In 1866, Celia’s father died and she spent more time on Appledore Island, helping her family with the hotel. Her growing literary fame attracted artists, writers and intellectuals, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Sarah Orne Jewett, James and Annie Fields.

The Appledore House and assorted buildings 1901

John Whittier showed her special kindness. The artist William Morris Hunt, a close family friend, visited the Isles frequently — and died there.

His student, portrait painter Rose Lamb, became a friend of Celia Thaxter’s. After her death, Lamb and Annie Fields compiled a book of her letters. In the introduction, they wrote, “Her “parlor,” as it was called, was a milieu quite as interesting as any of the “salons” of the past.”

In one letter to Lamb, on April 15, 1894, Celia Thaxter wrote,

I cannot tell you how beautiful it is to be here, and I wish for you every day. It is so still and heavenly and fresh and full of promise. I work all day long, mostly out of doors, and there are so many pleasant things to do. Not easy, there is a great deal of hard work, but I love it all.

Childe Hassam painted several pictures of her in her garden, which had its own celebrity. Its flowers filled the rooms at Appledore House. She wrote a book about it called An Island Garden, which Hassam illustrated. The Shoals Marine Laboratory, now on Appledore, has recreated the garden.

“Poppies” from Celia Thaxter’s garden by Childe Hassam

Celia Thaxter and Birds

Celia Thaxter grew outraged by the slaughter of birds for ladies’ hats, which she called “funeral pyres they carry on their heads.” She took the post of secretary of the Audubon Society of Waltham, Mass., in 1886. The next year she wrote an article for the first issue of Audubon Magazine called ‘Women’s Heartlessness.’

She also struck up a correspondence with Bradford Torrey, an ornithologist who published a popular book, Birds in the Bush. “I am all the time vexed at my ignorance, and wish somebody were here to tell me the different birds and recognize those delicious voices,” she wrote in a letter to him in 1890.

Celia Thaxter In Her Garden by Childe Hassam

Heavenly and Fresh

By 1893 she had grandchildren. “I don’t think I ever realized what “fun” was until I became a grandmother!” she wrote to her friend, Feroline W. Fox. “Isn’t it delightful?”

Celia Thaxter died suddenly on Aug. 25, 1894 at the age of 59. Four months before her death she wrote to Rose Lamb.

I cannot tell you how beautiful it is to be here, and I wish for you every day. It is so still and heavenly and fresh and full of promise. I work all day long, mostly out of doors, and there are so many pleasant things to do. Not easy, there is a great deal of hard work, but I love it all; and Karl is so good and helps me with the heaviest, and we have such a good time together.

The garden is a wilderness of sticks and stalks and rubbish from last year, and it is a job to begin, after pruning the roses, to clear all this away, to dig up the hollyhock roots that have sowed themselves outside and transplant in the inside of the fence, to fork over and manure all the earth, etc.

Celia Thaxter’s cottage on the Isles of Shoals.

I have my mother’s big, sunny room, with one opening out of it for Karl; and the large bay window is full of tables, and boxes of seeds that I am watching with as much delight as if I had never done it before. It is such a pleasure.

I am busy every instant, so glad and thankful to be here. No tongue can tell it; just to be here, it is all I ask. Sometimes I am afraid I enjoy it too much, and wonder what ever would become of me if I had to be away.

Flowers from her garden covered her coffin.

This story was updated in 2022. Images: Celia Thaxter house in Newtonville By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20433891.

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Will the Real Annie Adams Fields Please Stand Up?

Publisher and poet James Fields saw his career take off after he married Annie Adams Fields. It was not a coincidence.

Annie Adams Fields, 1890, by John Singer Sargent

Fields’ reputation as a publisher rested on his ability to spot promising authors, but his wife had the eagle eye for talent.

Annie Adams Fields

She was born to a genteel Boston family on June 6, 1834. At 20, she married the 37-year-old Fields. He had just been made a partner at the publishing house Ticknor & Fields. She helped him discover such writers as Horatio Alger, Sarah Orne Jewett, Celia Thaxter and Emma Lazarus.

James Fields

She presented herself as the perfect hostess and society wife. Charles Dickens called her,‘ “one of the dearest little women in the world.”

Annie and her husband kept a literary salon at their home on Beacon Hill in Boston. The most famous writers of the day congregated at the Fields’ home. They included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, John Greenleaf Whittier, Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe. When their friend Nathaniel Hawthorne died, James Fields served as a pallbearer at his funeral.

Ticknor & Fields bought The Atlantic Monthly in 1859, and James Fields took over as editor in 1861. With his wife’s help, he turned it into the most influential magazine of its day.

The Atlantic Monthly offices on Tremont Street in Boston, around 1868

Throughout Annie’s life, she stayed out of her husband’s spotlight. In 1902 an anonymous writer described her as “gentle, quiet and reserved.” That writer also sensed something behind her facade, noting, ‘there is no power in Boston to-day like that of Mrs. Fields.’

Behind that facade, Annie Adams Fields was a writer in her own right. She published poetry and biographies and edited collections of letters.

Helping Women and the Poor

She was an ardent, if quiet, supporter of women authors and women’s rights. After her husband died, she lived the rest of her life with her best friend, Sarah Orne Jewett, in a Boston marriage.

Annie Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett in Fields’ Charles Street library.

Annie Fields was a social reformer and a quiet activist who founded the Holly Tree Inns, non-profit restaurants that served inexpensive food (but no liquor) to working women. She also started the Lincoln Street Home, a residence hotel for unmarried working women. She supported local charities, and her book How to Help the Poor served as an unofficial guide to the Associated Charities of Boston.

Annie Adams Fields died on Jan. 5, 1915.

With thanks to Annie Adams Fields: Woman of Letters by Rita K. Gollin. This story last updated in 2022.

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