Blanchard’s biography on Jewett superb

SARAH ORNE JEWETT: Her World and Her Work, by Paula Blanchard, Addison-Wesley, 397 pages, $27.50.

This scholarly biography calls to mind a phrase in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”: Rich, not gaudy. Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) — famed for the evergreen splendor of her magnum opus, “The Country of the Pointed Firs,” a string of color sketches that primarily highlights the hardy women of the isolated, coastal Dunnet Landing — is seen in this biography as a generous-hearted, dark-haired woman with searching, deep-set eyes and a mouth made for laughter.

The second of three daughters born to country doctor Theodore Jewett and his frail, aristocratic wife, Caroline, Sarah was reared in the Maine village of South Berwick near the New Hampshire border. Too brilliant by far for the pedestrian role of country doctor, Sarah’s father was descended from pre-Revolutionary War stock, and Berwick was a beehive of Jewetts, all of whom doted on Sarah and her sisters.

Although she once remarked drolly that she was made of Berwick dust, Sarah often felt a sense of confinement. Still, although in time she traveled extensively and lived part time in Boston, her deep village taproot always held her hostage to Berwick.

From childhood on, she fought bravely against bouts of rheumatoid arthritis so painful that “Her joints, particularly knees and shoulders, would ache and swell to many times their size; sometimes she could not even see her own feet.” During such times, when it was impossible for her to attend school, her father would take Sarah with him in his horse-and-buggy on his rural rounds. Wide-eyed and silent, Sarah would sit in a corner of the farm kitchens and listen raptly to the “tasty talk” of the women in the farmhouses. Years later she was to reprise their colorful vernacular so flawlessly in her Maine sketches that it prompted her editor at The Atlantic Monthly to exclaim, “I hear your people talk.”

Often when Sarah accompanied her father he would point out wildflowers and take her to the hidden places where herbs grew. Again, Sarah listened and learned, and not many years later was moving her treasury of knowledge from her memory into stories such as the haunting “A White Heron” and the captivating complexity of the herb lady (widow Almira Todd) in “The Country of the Pointed Firs.”

Although Sarah turned out large numbers of children’s stories and poems in her teens, she was well into her 20s before she made a sale to the prestigious Atlantic Monthly magazine. But although its founder and editor, James T. Fields, and his assistant, William Dean Howells, who ultimately took over when Fields retired, rejected many of Sarah’s submissions, they always did so with suggestions for their improvement, and it was their patient encouragement that eventually coaxed her budding talent into full flower. In 1873, The Atlantic Monthly published the first of her Deephaven sketches, “The Shore House.” Four years later, her first book, “Deephaven,” a series of Maine sketches, appeared.

From then on, her success was swift as a swallow. Fame, money, and a warm welcome into the charmed circles of Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell and Hawthorne followed. But Sarah’s image of herself as a daisy — “a flower too ordinary to be in any way remarkable but nevertheless having its own perfection and, above all, its own integrity” — never faltered. She breasted fame with the same grace under pressure that had carried her through the trials of rheumatoid arthritis, and the loss of grandparents, parents and her younger sister.

In 1882 Sarah and Annie Adams Fields became a couple in a relationship euphemistically referred to back then as “a Boston marriage.” Annie, who was 12 years older than Sarah, was the wealthy, talented (poet) widow of the founder of The Atlantic Monthly. An international literary leader of the day, she was also a social reformer of considerable importance.

Was theirs a lesbian union? No, says Blanchard. “They functioned well as a unit. They were good for one another.” And they stayed together for the rest of their lives. Known for their brilliance and lightheartedness, a friend recalls that once, when she paid a call at their Boston home, she found the ceiling of the drawing room bright with floating balloons.

Everything is here and in place in this superb biography — discussions of Jewett’s canon of 20 books, her life in Maine, the years in Boston, and the trips abroad inset with the pearls of their visits to the literary luminaries of the day. Paula Blanchard is a Merlin whose skill as a biographer dazzles like an opal striking fire from the past. Author of two previous biographies, she lives with her family in Lexington, Mass.

Bea Goodrich’s reviews are a monthly feature in the Books & Music section.