Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches
1849
Sarah Orne Jewett captured something the great American realists often missed: the inner life of quiet places. Deephaven, her first collection, introduces us to Kate Lancaster and her friend Helen, two young women who spend a summer in a decaying Maine seaside town after Kate inherits her grand-aunt's home. What unfolds is neither a conventional romance nor a sentimental tale of small-town charm. Jewett renders the coastal landscape with unsentimental precision, revealing the subtle social hierarchies and unspoken longings among fishermen, lighthouse keepers, and faded gentry. The women navigate this world with curiosity and wit, discovering that Deephaven's true richness lies not in its faded grandeur but in the quiet dignity of its people. These linked stories established Jewett's signature approach: spare, impressionistic prose that finds profound meaning in the rhythms of everyday life. Her women characters particularly resonate. They're independent, capable, and searching for fulfillment in a world that rarely asks what they want. Willa Cather considered Jewett among America's greatest writers, and this collection shows why.
Editions
X-Ray
“Her hospitality was something exquisite; she had the gift which so many women lack, of being able to make themselves and their houses belong entirely to a guest's pleasure,--that charming surrender for the moment of themselves and whatever belongs to them, so that they make a part of one's own life that can never be forgotten.””
— Sarah Orne Jewett
“T’aint’ no use to look for public sperit ‘less you’ve got some yourself.””
— Sarah Orne Jewett
“We are more likely to busy ourselves with finding things to do than in doing with our might the work that is in our hands already.””
— Sarah Orne Jewett
“We go so far in our vigorous observance of the first commandment, and our fear of worshiping strange gods, that sometimes we are in danger of forgetting that we must worship God himself. And worship is something different from a certain sort of constant church-going, or from even trying to be conformers and to keep our own laws and our neighbors’.””
— Sarah Orne Jewett
“If clergymen knew their congregations as well as physicians do, the sermons would be often more closely related to the parish needs.””
— Sarah Orne Jewett
“It is not one’s surroundings that can help or hinder – it is having a growing purpose in one’s life to make the most of whatever is in one’s reach. If you have but a few good books, learn those to the very heart of them. Don’t for one moment believe that if you had different surroundings and opportunities you would find the upward path any easier to climb. One condition is like another, if you have not the determination and the power to grow in yourself.””
— Sarah Orne Jewett
“Man has done his best to ruin the world he lives in.””
— Sarah Orne Jewett
“I often wondered a great deal about the inner life and thought of these self-contained old fishermen; their minds seemed to be fixed upon nature and the elements rather than upon any contrivances of man, like politics or theology.””
— Sarah Orne Jewett
“The more one lives out of doors the more personality there seems to be in what we call inanimate things. The strength of the hills and the voice of the waves are no longer only grand poetical sentences, but an expression of something real, and more and more one finds God himself in the world, and believes that we may read the thoughts that He writes for us in the book of Nature.””
— Sarah Orne Jewett
