Sarah Orne Jewett

(1849 - 1909)

Sarah Orne Jewett made a career of writing naturalistic fiction about the people and domestic life of southern Maine, where she was born and died. She often wrote the dialect of locals phonetically; the accents used by Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe in the 2019 film The Lighthouse were an attempted reproduction of the voices captured by Jewett’s prose. Jewett lived with the writer Annie Adams Fields for much of her adult life, a relationship that retroactively became one of the prototypical “Boston Marriages.”