A Marsh Island
Sarah Orne Jewett
This text duplicates the first printing,
Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Company
The Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1885
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Atlantic Monthly Serialization of A Marsh Island.
Copyright © 2001-5 by Terry Heller
Salt marsh at low tide, near Wells, Maine.
September 2002
A Marsh Island has not fared well among Jewett's works. Critics have given it almost no attention at all. Except for Margaret Roman in Sarah Orne Jewett: Reconstructing Gender, most of the few people who have reported reading it have seen it as one of Jewett's lesser works. Below are two typical evaluations of the novel.
As I have prepared this work for the Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project, I have found much to like about it. I have wondered whether previous readers have made too much of the love story and too little of the story of the artist finding himself, which seems obviously to be a version of Jewett's own entering into her vocation from a privileged social position.
Below are two well-expressed and typical evaluations, presented in order to help point the question posed by the reception of this novel so far. Has it deserved its obscurity?
Acknowledgments
The following people did important work on preparing,
editing and annotating this text.
Linda Heller, Gabe Heller, Jay Searls,
and the members of the Fall 2000 Seminar on Jewett at Coe College: Lonni
Evans, Laura Heugel, Liane Kido, Thomas Metzler, Claire Smith, Lisa
Thorpe.
Two Evaluations
Critic 4 (8 August 1885): 64.
Miss Jewett's new book is in
many ways very pleasant reading. It is a great advance upon A Country
Doctor, and exhibits at their best the fine literary traits that have
made for Miss Jewett the enviable reputation of one who can interest the
public in simple things. Nothing could be better of the kind than the bits
of landscape scattered through the book. Inimitable is the description
of the marshes, 'looking as if the land had been raveled out into
the sea.' and of the tide, 'holding itself bravely for a time: it had grasped
the land nobly; all the great weight and power were come in and had prevailed;
it shone up at the sky, and laughed in the sun's face; then changed its
mind, and began to creep away again; it would rise no more that morning,
but at night the world should wonder!' So keen and bright and true are
these pen-sketches, that if they had been left as landscape painting they
would have seemed not only exquisite but spirited. The effort to mingle
with them, however, something of a story of life and human nature, has
resulted in a drowsy effect upon the reader, which reminds one of Lucretia
Mott's saying on entering a room where her husband and brother were together:
'Ah! I thought thee must both be here; it was so quiet!' it is impossible
to feel excited, very hard to feel even decently interested, as regards
the characters of the story. The mise en scène is perfect,
but the people are dull. That is, they are not even really dull; they simply
do not exist for us. The good housewife does not touch our hearts, even
as a frier of doughnuts; Doris is entirely inanimate; and the artist is
as quiet as if he knew professionally that he ought to sit still while
his portrait was being painted. But it is pleasanter to praise, and for
the scenery and settings of the incidents no one could have anything but
praise. It is, indeed, because they are so fine that one looks for something
more important to happen in them than the eating of apples or the making
of a pie.
Paula Blanchard, Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World & Her Work. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1994.
She was not at all sure at first what the characters were going to do, but after a while told Whittier with some surprise that it promised to be "a 'blooming' love story." She soon realized that she was uncomfortable with what she had gotten herself into, "I know I could write a better story without a lover in it!" she lamented to Annie, and like all her similar attempts, this "love" story never warms beyond friendship. (164)
Such as it is, the plot turns on the question of whether the daughter, Doris, will succumb to Dale's big-city charms or prove true to Dan Lester, a local blacksmith she has known since childhood who has never gotten around to proposing marriage. The lack of ardor on everyone's part is, in the end, ludicrous: poor Doris actually feels "dumb before her inevitable fate" when she first thinks Dan is about to propose. We are constantly aware of an unspoken third possibility for Doris, that of remaining independent and free . . . . [Unlike Nan Prince and Sylvia] Doris is an ordinary girl, strong and intelligent but with no definite talent. She and her father are good friends, and there is an implied, might-have-been scenario of Doris remaining on the farm, helping both parents, and eventually inheriting it herself. But Jewett, clearly writing against the grain but determined to write a conventional romance about a "normal" girl, ignores her heroine's half-articulated longing for independence and her identification with the crows, who "were masters of the air, and could fly, while men could not." (165)
Jewett's fictional "Sussex" may
in fact be a town in which a girl like Doris could be happy, but we are
not given any description of the town itself, only of the farm some miles
away. Because we are given no idea of the ways in which Doris's life with
Dan will be interesting and fulfilling, and because her sudden resolution
to marry lacks emotional plausibility, the novel fails even as a potboiler
romance. No writing of Jewett's is an utter failure, however, and the descriptions
of the marsh and farm life, and the characterizations of the senior Owens
and their helper, Tempy, are up to her usual mark. (166)
Images the 1885 Edition of A Marsh Island
Weber & Weber's description in A Bibliography of
the Published Writings of Sarah Orne Jewett
indicates that these images are from the first edition.
Cover
Title Page
Courtesy of the University of Iowa Library
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