| . |
Reviews, Responses, and Correspondence
related to Sarah Orne Jewett's The Tory LoverThis is a growing collection of reviews and responses to Jewett's novel.
For more letters related to the novel, see Letters / Other Letters from 1900 onward.
Contributions are welcome. Please send them to the site manager.Contents
Houghton, Mifflin Publicity Brochure
Portland Journal review of serial
Lewiston Journal Magazine
Letter from Kipling
from A. Fields, Charles Dudley Warner
[ Contents ] Houghton, Mifflin Brochure on the book publication
of The Tory Lover by Sarah Orne Jewett"Something more than merely a good
historical novel." - Boston Herald.
THE TORY LOVER
By Sarah Orne JewettPrice, $1.50
For sale at all bookstores.
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
Boston and New York
NOTICES FROM NEW ENGLAND
It is one of the most pleasing, dignified, and artistic historical novels of the last five years. Indeed, one would be at a loss to point to a modern historical romance that equals it in all those qualities and features that make a book worth reading twice. - Boston Herald.
It is a book which will bring especial delight to New Englanders, but its characters and the treatment of them are great and broad enough to win admiration anywhere. It will long outlive the year of its appearance. - Editorial in Boston Journal.
It is the emphatic verdict of all who have learned to admire the subtle imaginative power, the refined humor and exquisite literary form of the writings of Sarah Orne Jewett, that she has put her best work thus far into The Tory Lover. The story as a story moves with stately grace; the historical setting is perfect. - The Beacon, Boston.
The story is told with great spirit, and the atmosphere of the period is well preserved. - Cambridge (Mass.) Tribune.
The reader is bound to recognize in The Tory Lover a faithfulness of incident, locality, and character which makes it a novel of unusual merit, easily ranking among the very best productions of its class. - Portsmouth (N. H.) Journal.
NOTICES FROM NEW YORK
Of all the historical gallery to which our novelist friends have introduced us of late, Mary Hamilton is easily the most winsome. - Oct. Book Buyer.
Miss Jewett carries all the finesse which characterizes her short stories into her new novel….It is a thoroughly wholesome and charming book. - N. Y. Evening Post.
The love story is fine, delicate, charming in every line, while the literary quality of the work is of the best sort. The Tory Lover ranks with the best fiction of the year. - Brooklyn Eagle.
The pictures of the life in rural Maine have a stamp that is all their own, and gives them charm and freshness, after all the work that has been done in this field by innumerable romancers of Revolutionary days. - N. Y. Mail and Express.
Has already attracted sufficient attention to make its popular success a foregone conclusion. - N. Y. Commercial Advertiser.
It tells an admirable story of courage and devotion to country, and is at once strong, brilliant, spirited, graceful, and true. - N. Y. Press.
NOTICES FROM THE WEST
That exquisite spirit pervades it, - a reflection of Miss Jewett's own loveliness of feeling, - a spirited beauty with which she has unconsciously invested her heroine, Mary Hamilton. Miss Jewett's painting of Berwick (her home in Maine) has the touch of unerring sincerity. - Chicago Inter-Ocean.
The difference between the average historical novel and this work of Miss Jewett's is the difference between the vital and the spectacular elements in literature and life. Where others have laid hold of the surface facts merely, she has grasped the inner meaning. - St. Paul Globe.
Her fine literary style assures the book a welcome among all readers fond of good literature. - San Francisco Chronicle.
A story of surpassing interest, skillfully blending history and fiction and presenting a most artistic series of famous pictures. - San Francisco Bulletin.
A good story…The characters of Mary Hamilton and Roger Wallingford are eminently sympathetic and awaken a genuine admiration. - New Orleans Picayune.
A beautifully finished piece of literary work. - Indianapolis Journal.
PAUL JONES IN THE TORY LOVER
Her picture of him is so vital and convincing that it supersedes any other. One seems to see the real man. - Octave Thanet in Oct. Book Buyer.
Miss Jewett's Paul Jones is more human, more convincing, less striking, and nearer to completeness than that of Mr. Churchill. - Boston Herald.
Miss Jewett has studied John Paul Jones carefully, with perhaps even more than due charity for his vanity. - New York Times.
The little man with the soul of a hero is drawn here as he lived, and it is not too much to say that he impresses one more vividly than in Winston Churchill's pages. - San Francisco Chronicle.
Perhaps the thing the reader will be most thankful for is the splendid picture of John Paul Jones, which Miss Jewett has given us. Within the past few years a dozen "lives" of this masterly "sea-wolf" have appeared. None of them has set forth the character of Jones with such life-like reality, with such flesh and blood "humanness" as does this story. - St. Paul Globe.
She adds to the charm of her locality the best picture of Paul Jones that has appeared in fiction. - Holyoke (Mass.) Transcript.
THE ONLY DIFFERENCE OF OPINION
The Tory Lover - a pretty story, well written and properly heralded, but which the present writer declines to review….Sarah Orne Jewett is well and pleasantly known to novel readers. …. In writing The Tory Lover she has improved on some of its popular predecessors. And there is nothing more to be said. - Flora Mai Holly in Oct. Bookman.
The sad blow has fallen. Another idol has crumbled to ashes, another reputation has been pulled down. Miss Flora Mai Holly has declined to review The Tory Lover. Miss Jewett, its author, she impartially admits, is "well and pleasantly known to novel readers, but she was tempted and she fell."…Miss Jewett is "well and pleasantly" known to American readers. To students of letters she is the brightest jewel in that coronet of short story writers which is the chief adornment of contemporary American literature. Who is Miss Flora Mia Holly? Why, she is the young lady who has declined to review The Tory Lover. - Editorial in New York Mail and Express, Oct. 5.
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO., Publishers
Boston and New York
This document is available courtesy of Wendy Pirsig.
[ Contents ]
Miss Sarah Orne Jewett hasn't moved her scene from Maine, in the opening chapters of her long-expected historical novel, "The Tory Lover." On the contrary, she gives a glimpse of a Maine mansion and its inhabitants of the long ago that reveals a tasteful, well ordered luxury in upper circles in summer that we have not come across any too frequently in American stories of the last century. It's the other half of the stress and storm people who set the Revolution in motion from that we have usually had presented to us in semi-historical accounts of the American revolt against Great Britain, and it's also a different plane of Maine society than that with which Miss Jewett has hitherto dealt. Furthermore, it is undoubtedly authentic, and most carefully and sympathetically studied. All of which makes it reasonable to forecast that it will be one of the popular serials not only of the coming year, but standard for many years to come.
[ Contents ]
Lewiston Journal Magazine Section 10/19-10/24, 1901
(Illustrated with two photographs: one of Jewett and the other of her South Berwick home.)
The Tory Lover: Sarah Orne Jewett's Novel of the American Revolution
Among all the novels for which the Revolutionary war has furnished material, "The Tory Lover," which Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston, publish[er], will have a distinct interest for Maine people and New Englanders in general.To begin with, the author is a Maine woman and a special favorite of Maine people, Miss Sarah Orne Jewett, and the book was written at her old home in South Berwick, under the shadows of the big trees with the odor of old fashioned flowers coming in at the window; in the same study we have here in the picture before us.
Then there is much local color and local characterization, for in the old historic towns of Berwick and York, not Boston or any Massachusetts towns, are laid the principal scenes.
So strong and true are the pictures drawn of life in Maine farming communities in those trying days and of the hardy Yankee farmers, they come to Maine readers with a sort of familiarity, born of the tales of those troublous times handed down from their forefathers.
The lapse of years has not surrounded the scene with the glamour of romance which, in so many historical novels, removes it so far from our everyday lives and feelings. Miss Jewett tells her story as simply and naturally as though it all happened but recently. Her readers feel a nearness to these men and women which makes them forget that more than a century separates them.
At the opening we are introduced to a class of aristocracy, whose culture and stately living in the northern wilderness may surprise the reader as it did Capt. Paul Jones who did not expect to find here the manner of life of a Virginia gentleman.
Easily and naturally are the glimpses of rough, rural life brought in and the scene transferred to the broad Atlantic, where Miss Jewett shows her thorough knowledge of seamanship by depicting the daily routine on board the warship Ranger and the little idiosyncrasies and sturdy [study] independence of the Maine sailors on board, who, all unused to naval discipline and restraint chafed under the strict rule of Jones.
For none other than the renowned Paul Jones is the hero of the story and here Miss Jewett gives one of her most intelligent and discriminating character portraitures. This has been variously done before, but perhaps never so fully and naturally. Paul Jones is not a hero of the stage here, but a man of history - a great man, it is true, but his foibles appear as clearly as his virtues. We do not have to judge him by what was best and worst in his nature, for Miss Jewett gives us all the gradations between the extremes. We see him in many moods and under many conditions. He is the blustering, abrupt and unyielding captain, who has apparently never learned the value of tact, but he is also the affable, sympathetic and appreciative companion on his official trip to Paris. Now he is moved to sentiment by the moonlight and Mary Hamilton, again he seems to have a mind only for adventure and love of glory. Miss Jewett has tried to avoid any exaggeration and present Capt. Paul Jones as he was, impatient of restraint, of the irksome bonds to opportunity and inspiration necessitated by circumstances, yet ever ready, though sore at heart, to do the best that was in him, to immortalize the little Ranger though the fine ship he had hoped for was not forthcoming.
With the same moderation she presents the varying attitude of the Colonists toward England. The war was a serious thing. There was much searching of heart[,] much doubt and fear. With a fine sense of justice Miss Jewett presents the varied feelings of the people. Roger Wallingford, a Tory by tradition, was no less a patriot because he was slow in the conviction of duty. In truth he was only partially convicted when he started out as lieutenant with Capt. Jones, but he was entirely convicted of his love for Mary Hamilton and she was an enthusiastic patriot. But having undertaken a duty Wallingford was not one to shirk and he wins the admiration of the reader as he did of Paul Jones who came to put great confidence in the young man.
Mary Hamilton is a lovely and lovable character with a decided individuality, as have all of Miss Jewett's characters. Among the interesting figures who move through the story is Master Sullivan, the aged scholar and gentleman, Mary's adviser and friend, who seems strangely out-of-place in his uncongenial surroundings.
The story, while stirring and full of incident, does not border on the sensational. There is nothing glaring nor artificial. It is distinguished by the mild humor and tender pathos characteristic of Miss Jewett.
On the whole, "The Tory Lover" is an addition [additture] to literature and to Maine people at least, a welcome addition to local and historical lore. The book is attractively illustrated and has as a frontispiece a charming medallion portrait of Mary Hamilton.
[ Contents ]
From a letter from Rudyard Kipling, 25 November 1901.
I think it's the biggest thing you've done yet and also I think that you've pulled it off - a result that not always attends the doing of big things. But what - apart from its felicities - interested me as a fellow craftsman was the amount of work - solid, laborious dig that must have gone to its making: and the art with which that dig is put away and disguised. I love that sort of work where only the fellow-labourer can see where his companion went and how far, for the stuff that seems to turn up so casually and yet so inevitably in the fabric of the weaving.
For the whole letter and more comments on the novel, see Thomas Pinney, ed. The Letters of Rudyard Kipling v. 3, pp. 78-9. University of Iowa Press, 1996.
[ Contents ]
From Mrs. James T. Fields, Charles Dudley Warner, 1904
Warner's faith in literature led him to be a prop and inciter to young authors. Where he could discern real talent and character he was ready to become a mainstay. Only those shivering upon the edge of a plunge into the sea of literary life can know what a help he was and what happiness his hope in behalf of others gave. His advice was born out of wide experience. There is a record of one of the many cases of his helpfulness, where he writes to Sarah Orne Jewett, who had confided to him the actual beginning of a story which he had first suggested and she had long been planning, "The Tory Lover"; "I am not in the least alarmed about the story, now that you are committed to it by the printing of the beginning, only this, that if you let the fire slow down to rest for a week or so, please do not take up any other work, but rest really. Do not let any other theme come in to distract your silent mulling over the story. Keep your frame of mind in it. The stopping to do any little thing will distract you. Hold the story always in solution in your mind ready to be precipitated when your strength permits. That is to say, even if your fires are banked up, keep the story fused in your mind." He wrote also to the same friend: "The Pointed Firs in your note perfumed the house as soon as the letter was opened, and were quite as grateful to me as your kind approval … . We are greatly rejoiced to know that you are getting better. I quite agree with you that being sick is fun compared to getting well. I want to see you ever so much and talk to you about your novel, and explain to you a little what I tried to do with Evelyn in my own. It seems to me possible to educate a child with good literature as well as bad; at least I tried the experiment. Most affectionately yours."