SOURCE: "Domesticity, Cultivation, and Vocation in Jane Addams and Sarah Orne Jewett," in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 48, March, 1994, pp. 507-28.

In the following essay, Sawaya compares the nonfiction portrayal of a household in Twenty Years at Hull-House with a fictional one in the work of Sarah Orne Jewett

In her preface to the 1893 edition of Deephaven Sarah Orne Jewett describes her call to vocation some twenty years earlier as having arisen out of her "dark fear that townspeople and country people would never understand one another."¹ She felt as a "younge writer" (p. 3) that "the individuality and quaint personal characteristics of rural New England" were being "swept away" (p. 5) by the rise of "fast-growing … cities" (p. 1), which had not only "drawn to themselves … much of the best life of the remotest villages," but which also in summer had sent to the country "the summer boarder" (p. 2) or tourist. "Grave...