Theodora Sarah Orne Jewett was born September 3, 1849, in South Berwick, a shipbuilding town inland from the Maine coast. Jewett suffered from arthritis as a girl and attended school only sporadically because of her ill health. Her real education came from her father, a doctor who often brought the young Jewett along with him on medical visits throughout the countryside. From these experiences, Jewett learned the art of detailed character observation. Her father also encouraged her to read the great works of American and European literature. At the age of sixteen she graduated from Berwick Academy.

Jewett's first story was published in a magazine when she was nineteen. Her real success began in 1869 when she was twenty, with the publication of one of her stories in the Atlantic Monthly. Her early stories were published under the pseudonyms Alice Eliot, A. D. Eliot, and Sarah C. Sweet. The...