As she accompanied him on house calls she made many of the observations and gained many of the insights that later inspired her fiction.
In later years she frequently quoted her father's advice to her in her letters to young writers. Two years before she published the first of her Maine stories, "The Shore House", in the Atlantic Monthly (September 1873), she wrote on the inside cover of her diary for 1871 the literary principle, gleaned from her father's advice, that was to control her work:
Father said this one day: "A story should be managed so that it should suggest interesting things to the reader instead of the author's doing all the thinking for him and setting it before him in black and white. The best compliment is for the reader to say Why didn't he put in "this" or "that."
Fond of writing down her ideas and observations, at first in verse and later in prose, from the time she was quite small, Jewett published her first story when she was eighteen; her only melodramatic short story, "Jenny Garrow's Lovers", appeared under the name of A.C. Eliot in the 18 January 1868 issue of the Flag of Our Union.
This is a free page. This page contains 188 words. This
biography contains 15,209 words (approx. 51 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our (Theodora) Sarah Orne Jewett Access Pass.
