When Harriet Beecher Stowe died in 1896 at the age of eighty-five, her twin daughters sent a photograph of their mother and a small, ornamental box in which the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) had stored her postage stamps to a woman whom their mother had considered a friend and a literary protege: Sarah Orne Jewett. Although nearly half a century apart in age, the two authors were products and champions of New England domestic culture. Stowe and Jewett were also witnesses to the distinctive character of the northernmost state in the region. During the early 1850s Stowe had lived for a year in the coastal town of Brunswick, Maine, while her husband spent two terms as professor of theology at Bowdoin College. Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, the novel that helped to launch the Civil War, in Brunswick, and her The Pearl of Orr's...