Theodora Sarah Orne Jewett was born 3 September 1849 in South Berwick, an upriver port in southern Maine. She was the second of three daughters of Caroline Frances Perry Jewett and Dr. Theodore Herman Jewett, a wealthy country doctor. The Embargo Act of 1807 had virtually destroyed the shipping industry in Maine, but in Jewett's childhood, memories of the great seafaring days of the past remained. Jewett heard the tales of adventures at sea that her paternal grandfather, who had been a captain, shared with his old cronies as they gathered at his general store in South Berwick. The economic decline of the region, the burgeoning industrialism, and the proliferation of manufacturing centers, which endangered the rural backwaters, were social forces that had no small effect on Jewett, a member of a gentry that looked back nostalgically at the past days of greatness.
Jewett was formally educated at Miss Raynes's School and Berwick Academy, but she was often sick and sometimes skipped classes, preferring to accompany her father as he visited his patients. The best of her education, Jewett was later to tell an interviewer, "was received in my father's buggy and the places to which it carried me." Dr.
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