SOURCE: “From Stowe's Eagle Island to Jewett's ‘White Heron,’” Colby Library Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 8, December, 1974, pp. 515–521.

In the essay below, Jobes traces the influence of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel The Pearl of Orr's Island on Jewett's art, particularly her self-definition as an artist.

Sarah Orne Jewett pointed out the influence of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Maine novel The Pearl of Orr's Island (1862) on her own writing and provided what has become the standard explanation of that influence. In her 1893 Preface to Deephaven, she acknowledges graciously that The Pearl of Orr's Island was the first work to show her how materials which she had known and loved from birth—Maine character, custom, landscape—could be used effectively in literature.

It was, happily, in the writer's childhood that Mrs. Stowe had written of those who dwelt along the wooded seacoast and by the decaying, shipless harbors of Maine. The first chapter...