Bily currently teaches at Adrian College. In the following essay, she examines the universal themes that Jewett uses in "A White Heron."

To her contemporaries, Sarah Orne Jewett was primarily a local color writer. Her stories and novels were peopled with typical villagers speaking in dialect, going about their daily work as country doctors or farmers or seafarers, moving about among the flora and fauna and landscape of New England. As a young avid reader, Jewett had admired the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe, especially her depictions of the common folk of the South, with their strengths and short comings. One of Jewett's aims as a writer was to present the people of her native Maine in the same honest and respectful light. But if her characters' speech and dress and mannerisms were identifiably regional, their concerns and problems were not. Like all the best local color...