Although not included among major American writers, Sarah Orne Jewett ranks high among those who have drawn upon the people, places, and culture of nineteenth-century New England for the substance of their work, and many of her "sketches," as she called her short stories, are representative of American regional writing at its best. She was born in South Berwick, Maine, on 3 September 1849 into an old and wealthy New England family of shipowners and merchants. Her father, Theodore Herman Jewett, to whom she was very close, was a respected local physician; her mother, Caroline Frances Perry Jewett, was a collateral descendent of Anne Bradstreet. Educated at home with her two sisters and at Miss Payne's School and Berwick Academy, from which she graduated in 1866, she later said she was an indifferent student. She often commented that her real education came from her father, as he shared with her his...