Sarah Orne Jewett

Read two beautiful short stories by Sarah Orne Jewett this morning -- "The Arrow in the Sunbeam" and "Miss Sydney's Flowers". I loved, once again, her lovely but very sincere and almost plain writing. She uses all the elegance that great writers use, but in a completely modest and unassuming manner.  

"The Country of the Pointed Firs" by Sarah Orne Jewett

I went back to this book today, and fell in love again with Jewett's smooth, modest prose and her humble but deep-rooted characters. These are stories, not of heroic soldiers and violence and striving after lost treasures, but of simple people as plain as most of us -- just everyday folks trying to take pleasure in their little lives. Reading her again today makes me see, again, that this is the kind of reading I most enjoy, and the kind I should spend most of my reading time with. Robert Louis Stevenson might write graceful sentences, but some of his writing seems shallow and ultimately unimportant to me. The Black Arrow had strong writing in it, but it was ultimately all about pretty wicked people doing wicked things to each other. Give me Sarah Jewett and her basically good people trying to be as good as possible.

Sarah Orne Jewett and George Eliot

Yesterday I continued reading Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life, with its graceful, artistic writing, and I also read a short story Sarah Orne Jewett, "A Winter Courtship" -- a brief, beautiful, and utterly honest tale of two elderly widowed travelers who decide, in the midst of a day's trip from one town to another in Maine in the late 1800's, to marry each other.

Sarah Orne Jewett and George Eliot

After spending the last month or so reading James Fenimore Cooper's The Deerslayer (a good read but definitely nowhere near a classic), I was pleased to go back to two of the finest authors who ever wrote -- Sarah Orne Jewett and George Eliot. I read a touching and beautiful story by Jewett about Irish immigrants to America, and went back to Eliot's Daniel Deronda to enjoy more of Eliot's wise and graceful sentences. She's one of the absolute best -- right up there with Shakespeare, Milton, and Dickens.