"you always help me to get a good hold on the best of myself"

 23 June 2022: 

"Dearest Annie, I do so long to see you—. I believe it would do me more good than anything you always help me to get a good hold on the best of myself. but I stil feel too weak to plan any journeys. They shall have to carry me [soon] from one room to another and I ache dreadfully by night and by day. I don’t know what to do about me I did so hope now to be out of doors in the garden" --Sarah Orne Jewett, to Annie Fields (qtd. in Love 327).

This undated letter, written late in Jewett's life after she had been seriously injured in a carriage accident from which she never fully recovered (in 1902) and had suffered a stroke (in 1909), made me tear up right here in my office when I read it today. (That the article also included a picture of the manuscript that showed her clearly declining abilities to hand-write made it much more poignant.) What more can we ask for in a relationship than what Jewett expresses here: that Fields "always help[s] me to get a good hold on the best of myself"? 

But I was well on my way to have Big Feelings about Jewett today, set in motion by this picture of her and Fields sitting together in their library. I had seen it before, but it hit me anew today, with what it reveals (and conceals). 

I know it says something about me that I find this image--two people (important literary figures, no less!), at work on separate tasks, yet together, in the home they shared--so moving. It seems ideal and lovely. 

So yup: seeing that image in the morning and then reading that letter later in the afternoon? Cue some tears. 

Heather Love's article (where I came across the letter) is also really fascinating and even a bit haunting. Glad to have read it, even if it's a bit of a bummer. (How's that for an academic take?)

Work Cited

Love, Heather. “Gyn/Apology: Sarah Orne Jewett’s Spinster Aesthetics.” ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, vol. 55, no. 3–4, 2009, pp. 305–34. EBSCOhost.