Master Smart Woman: A Portrait of Sarah Orne Jewett

Date1984

Can DescriptionsCommercial production. Description from Maine Humanities Council record: Documentary on Maine novelist Sarah Orne Jewett. Opens with paintings and still photographs. Reading voice over. Frances Sternhagen performs the voice of Jewett. Mary Stuart is narrator. Jewett was born in South Berwick, Maine, in 1850. Images of town and harbor, 'sad captains.' Late 1870s, trips to Boston and New York. Many nineteenth-century authors visited Annie Fields in Boston. Annie Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett had a 'Boston marriage,' they were lesbian partners. They spent half the year in Berwick and half the year at Manchester-by-the-Sea and Boston. Excerpts from letters from 1887 to 1902. The Country of the Pointed Firs, Jewett's book, was published when she was 47. It contains wives, widows, hermits and sea captains. Yankee characters, and women's concerns: home, family life. Died 1909 age 59. Accompanying book, Master Smart Woman: A Portrait of Sarah Orne Jewett; Unity, ME: North Country Press, 1988