"Martha's Lady," again...

10 March 2026: “...life was such a passion and happiness of service that it was impossible not to be devout." --Jewett, "Martha's Lady"

I am getting ready to teach this story again for the first time since 2018, I think. Found myself tearing up all through it for so many reasons. It's achingly beautiful.

"something to do in the world..."

16 November 2023: Just finished my Jewett entry and cracked the 120K-word count barrier, both of which feel pretty darn good. I am a tiny bit bummed not to have found a place to include this excerpt from an 1873 letter that Jewett, then a young writer, penned to Hoarce E. Scudder: 

“I am getting quite ambitious and really feel that writing is my work - my business perhaps; and it is so much better than making a mere amusement of it as I used…I am glad to have something to do in the world and something which may prove very helpful and useful if I care to make it so, which I certainly do” (27). 

There is something so pure about her earnestness here, her belief that writing is her work and that it is something to “do in the world” that might “prove very helpful and useful.” 

Work Cited

Jewett, Sarah Orne. Sarah Orne Jewett: Letters. Edited with an introduction by Richard Cary, Colby College P, 1956.

"I had a desire to go out farther into the world..."

9 November 2023: Quietly working from home this morning before heading up to campus for a big Board of Governor's meeting. A lot on my mind, but I find myself profoundly moved by thIis passage from Carol Schachinger's essay: 

“In a fascinating essay, ‘The Confessions of a House­Breaker,’ written when she was just beginning her relationship with Fields, Jewett writes of breaking out of the house in a pre­dawn walk through the village. Even so small an act of defying convention causes her to look over her shoulder: ‘I had a desire to go out farther into the world, and I went some distance up the street, past my neighbors' house; feeling a sense of guilt and secrecy that could hardly be matched. . . . But if any one had suddenly hailed me from a window I should have been inclined to run home as fast as my feet could carry me. In such fashion are we bound to the conventionalities of existence!’ Central to the experience is a clairvoyant connection to a distant friend—a feeling that another person is awake and close to her in spirit: ‘an understanding between us sprang up quickly, like a flame on the altar to Friendship, in my heart’ (239). I imagine her in love with Annie Fields, unable to sleep, still struggling inwardly with what such an attachment means in a society that doesn't even have a word for love between women besides the euphemism ‘Boston marriage.’ Breaking through the bounds of convention causes her extreme anxiety: she ‘steals’ out of the house, feels ‘astray’ as she goes farther down the street, but soon is overcome by a sense of exhilaration at her daring. She jumps the fence on her return home (a decorous woman in her thirties) instead of opening the gate, then feels ‘dismayed afterward at such singular conduct’ (243). I can imagine her stealing back upstairs in the dark house to her room, falling asleep in the dawn to awaken hours later still ‘delighted and puzzled’ about the implications of her symbolic breakout (243)” (Schachinger 281-282).

Schachinger, Carol. "Sarah Orne Jewett's Maine: A Journey Back.” Jewett and Her Contemporaries: Reshaping the Canon, edited by Karen L. Kilcup and Thomas S. Edwards. UP of Florida, 1999, pp. 277-286.

2000 words...

27 June 2022: Wrote just a bit over 2000 words today, from outline to a pretty-close-to-done draft of my The Country of the Pointed Firs entry. I didn't have any other appointments or meetings so I could just concentrate on this task and take my time with it. I know that's a luxury I won't have once the semester starts, so it feels especially good to have taken advantage of it. 

I am also doing a good job of sort of outlining an outline as I read and take notes so that when I start the actual outline, it isn't as much from scratch. Just an interesting (to me) development that seems to be working. 

And this project? Stressful and anxiety-inducing? Absolutely. But also still fun? Absolutely. 

"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.

"that untouchable foglike center..."

 22 June 2022: “The spell of Jewett’s words tantalizes and draws us on to read, but it never directly names. There is always that kernel of mystery, that untouchable foglike center that pulls us onward into that world beyond the ice, the imagination” (Hobbs 33).

Diving deep into Jewett now, working on my entry on Country of the Pointed Firs. Really love this take by Michael Hobbs, who is arguing that Captain Littlepage's story replicates, "in ironic miniature, a unifying narrative structure for Jewett’s work" (27). Hobbs does some really lovely gesturing towards Jewett's larger achievement--much appreciated by me as I remember again and again how much I love this text.

Work Cited

Hobbs, Michael. “World beyond the Ice: Narrative Structure in The Country of the Pointed Firs.” Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 29, no. 1, 1992, pp. 27–34. EBSCOhost.

Summer Advising: DONE!

21 June 2022: Hard to believe it, but we finished first-year advising today. It went just fine and was kind of fun, especially working with my colleagues face-to-face and (of course!) meeting the new students. 

And for a metaphor that seems quite fitting, as I pulled onto my street today heading home, I stopped my car to help a turtle cross the street. (Also had a student say she was moving as fast as a "herd of turtles" today, so ha!)

Now it's onto just writing, writing, writing (and Assistant Dean stuff) (and course prep) from here until the semester starts. The writing was going well post-advising this afternoon...until the power went out on campus. Let's hope Word managed to save a decent portion of what I had drafted. If not, I have my chicken-scratched draft/additions. That's tomorrow's problem, though, as the power hadn't come back on (along with access to the network drive) by the time I left campus. This evening, I am focusing on reading for the next entry, on The Country of the Pointed Firs. 

"Poor Joanna"

11 November 2019: "She was full o' feeling, and her troubles hurt her more than she could bear. I see it all now as I couldn't when I was young.” --Mrs. Fosdick on "Poor Joanna" in The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett

I am working my way through this amazing little book with my ENGL 346 class and today find myself moved all over again by Jewett's careful and sensitive creation of characters like Joanna (who never actually appears in the text's "present"--she is just someone the other characters remember). I love what Mrs. Fosdick expresses here: the understanding and increased compassion that can come with growing older, especially for people who seem destined for great trials and sadness.

"Martha's Lady"

17 February 2018: "Life was beginning to hold moments of something like delight in the last few days." --Sarah Orne Jewett, "Martha's Lady"

I am teaching this lovely and bittersweet story once again on Monday. What a pleasure it has been to re-read it tonight and think about how much one person can change another person's life just by being who she is--and how long that transformative power can last.

End-of-Summer Syllabizing

I haven't gotten nearly as much work done as I wanted to this summer, but I am rather proud of this accomplishment: as of today, 2 August 2008, I have all my syllabi ready for the Fall semester. Not bad, right? I just put the Xerox requests in and everything. My webpages are ready to go. Go me!

You can check out the fruits of my labor here, if you are so inclined. While I've taught ENG 102 and ENG 204 before, I had to do some re-arranging on two counts. First, each course has switched to new editions of its respective textbook,* which meant adjusting page numbers and, in some cases, reading selections for each. Second, the days both courses meet have changed. In the past, I taught ENG 102 as a MWF class. Now it's a TR. In the past, I've taught ENG 204 as TR. Now it's a MWF. Those kinds of changes do require some reconceptualization, especially for ENG 102, which is a writing course. I rather like the changes made to the 204 syllabus--I've even included three new writers (Richard Wright, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Jhumpa Lahiri). I am not so sure yet about 102. It looks a bit rushed at certain points in the semester (at least on the page), but maybe it will be okay.

ENG 346 is the new one for me--and I am pretty excited about it. It's a version of a class I taught at Richmond, but whereas that course stopped in 1865, I am framing this course as a study of the American novel from the beginning until 1900 (well, technically 1896, ending with Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs). The reading schedule is a bit ambitious, I know. I've already had one student email me and say "You don't believe in light reading, do you?" However, they can handle it--especially if they want to be English majors.

*Don't even get me started on this whole "new edition" issue. I understand the need to keep updating things, but some of these prices are insane. I don't get to choose the books for the gen. ed. classes I teach (101, 102, 204)--and if I did, there's no way I'd pick the hugely over-priced Perrine's. It's a great book, but not worth over $100.