Pontine Theatre marks 100th anniversary of author Sarah Orne Jewett’s death with ‘Dunnet Landing Stories’

Downtown South Berwick does not look terribly different today than it did 150 years ago. A framed photograph hanging in the Sarah Orne Jewett House museum shows the town square as it appeared in 1870, and other than a group of cows clogging the dirt road, the landscape hasn’t changed much. Many of the wood buildings that surrounded the intersection of Main and Portland streets are still standing, lending this southern Maine community on the New Hampshire border enduring charm.

The house, constructed in 1774 by a wealthy sea merchant named Tilly Haggens, is also remarkably unchanged. Sarah Orne Jewett was born in this luxuriant Georgian home in 1849 and lived there, on and off, until her death in 1909—exactly a century ago. Jewett’s second-story bedroom is just as she left it, with various trinkets and pictures on the fireplace mantle, her reading glasses hanging from a wood-framed mirror. Not far from her bedroom door, an old writing desk sits beside a sunny window that overlooks the square. It was here that Jewett penned some of the locally set novels that earned her a permanent place in the nation’s literary canon.

Pontine Theatre is commemorating the 100th anniversary of Jewett’s death with an original stage adaptation of the “Dunnet Landing Stories,” which represent some of the famed local author’s final works. The two-person ensemble of Marguerite Mathews and Greg Gathers, along with an arsenal of handcrafted puppets, will offer performances at West End Studio Theatre in Portsmouth beginning on Friday, April 24. Five stories will come to life with the integration of two live actors, intricate puppets and other homemade props.

Mathews and Gathers are already well acquainted with Jewett’s work. The pair adapted her 1896 masterpiece “The Country of the Pointed Firs” for the stage in 1994, and it has remained part of their touring repertoire.

“We just fell in love with her work doing that,” said Gathers, who, in addition to co-directing and acting in the play, created the puppets and most of the set pieces.

Last year, Pontine premiered a production of Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s 1869 novel “The Story of a Bad Boy.” Aldrich, who grew up in Portsmouth, was a close friend of Jewett’s, and the two were part of a thriving literary scene here during the latter half of the 19th century. Gathers and Mathews have found that area audiences harbor a strong interest in the Seacoast’s native writers, and few authors captured the spirit and atmosphere of southern Maine as colorfully and accurately as Jewett.

According to Mathews, who lived in South Berwick for several years, town residents often refer to Jewett as “our dear Sarah.” Jewett, herself, was known to proudly proclaim that she was “of Berwick dust.”

“She really has such a presence in South Berwick,” Mathews said. “There’s such a sense of respect and fondness for her.”

RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth will host a roundtable discussion about Jewett and her work on Monday, April 27 at 7 p.m. Panelists include Peggy Wishart, site manager of the Sarah Orne Jewett House; Josephine Donovan, a Jewett biographer; and Sarah Sherman, author of “Sarah Orne Jewett: An American Persephone.”

According to Sherman, who teaches English at the University of New Hampshire, the “Dunnet Landing Stories” are actually set farther up the Maine coast in Tenants Harbor and Port Clyde, where Jewett sometimes spent her summers.

“Her most famous work is more concerned with these more rural fishing towns up on the coast, and people in those towns were involved in working in fishing or, earlier, with the shipping industry,” Sherman said. “That world of Dunnet Landing is in some ways more isolated, more rural, more pre-industrial (than the Seacoast).”
The stories follow the narrator’s interactions with several local characters, including the landlady Mrs. Todd and her brother William Blackett. Jewett paints vivid pictures of the rural landscape in this humble trading port and showcases the people who populate its shores. The characters unwind their tales over quiet cups of tea, coloring each memory with distinctive Maine dialects. 

On the surface, Sherman notes, the stories do not appear to have any central conflict or drama. And yet Jewett’s work, which often focused on relationships between women, illustrates the bonds that maintain human communities.

“The drama is in how these people are coming to understand each other and coming to trust each other and feel intimate together,” Sherman said. “What we’re seeing is how relationships between people are built, and that has traditionally been, in many ways, women’s work.” 

That drama unfolds eloquently in Pontine’s new play. Mathews and Gathers variously adopt the role of narrator, filling the spaces between stories with soliloquies on the changing New England seasons. They also share the duty of voicing and manipulating the puppets, some of which Gathers carved from wood, including an astonishingly lifelike Abby Martin in “The Queen’s Twin.”

Gathers built the set’s collapsible wooden floor, as well as a table, bench, hutch and other props. He also made the pair’s old-fashioned costumes, and both adopt the unmistakable Maine accents of their characters. They have been rehearsing since the fall, and the result is a play that, despite its near absence of physical action, captivates with its lush language and fanciful props.

“There’s kind of a Zen quality about her writing. It’s so boiled down,” Mathews said.

Indeed, Jewett was a woman of remarkable depth and complexity. In addition to becoming a famous author, she was an environmentalist and, some would say, an early feminist. Unlike most writers of her time, Jewett’s writing put a spotlight on the lives and work of women.

“I think it empowered women of the time in that she so forcefully centered her stories on women’s lives and what was important to women and put women’s relationships to each other at the center of her work,” Sherman said. 

One of three sisters, Jewett came from a wealthy family. Her grandfather, Captain Theodore Furber Jewett, was a prosperous merchant and ship owner from Portsmouth. He purchased the South Berwick house at the corner of Main and Portland streets in 1819, and Sarah was born there 30 years later. The captain later built a second house next door, and Sarah and her parents moved there when she was five or six years old. Sarah was in her mid to late 30s when she moved back to the main house with her older sister Mary and their mother. Although she often traveled to Boston and Europe, she would frequently return to the house for the rest of her life.

“This was the most taxed house in town, which meant it was the grandest,” said Peggy Wishart.

Historic New England now owns the Sarah Orne Jewett House and offers tours there from June to October. The neighboring house, known as the Jewett-Eastman House, is now the town library.

Sarah’s father, Theodore Herman Jewett, was a doctor. She often joined him on trips to visit patients in the countryside. Many of these patients would become characters in her books, and her father was surely part of the inspiration for her 1884 novel “A Country Doctor.” Her mother, Caroline Frances Perry, was a descendent of the Perry and Gilman families of Exeter.

Jewett graduated from Berwick Academy in 1866 and had her first story published in Atlantic Monthly when she was only 19. Her early work drew quick praise from Atlantic editor William Dean Howells, who owned a home in Kittery. She published her first book, “Deephaven,” in 1879. Her Revolutionary War novel “The Tory Lover,” set in Historic New England’s Hamilton House in South Berwick, was published in 1907.

Although Jewett never married, she became close friends with Annie Fields and her husband, publisher James Fields. After James Fields died in 1881, Jewett became increasingly close to Annie, living with her for about half of each year. The pair formed a monogamous partnership known as a “Boston marriage,” which was fairly common for pairs of women in the 19th century.

Although she spent much of her time in Massachusetts, Jewett remained deeply invested in South Berwick throughout her life. When a textile mill was built in neighboring Rollinsford (now the Salmon Falls Mill buildings), she worried that the factory would deplete the area’s natural beauty.

“She was definitely an environmentalist,” Sherman said. “That’s definitely a part of her ethos as a writer.”

Jewett’s short story “The Gray Mills of Farley” describes a similar mill and the Irish and French Canadian immigrants who worked there. Although Jewett was concerned with preserving nature and the past, Sherman notes that her writing was very sympathetic to the mill workers.

“Some people say Jewett represents a kind of anti-modern retreat to this ideal of an all white, all Protestant name,” Sherman said. “I think there’s some truth to that, but Jewett wanted to preserve the best of what rural life had to offer, the best of what the past had to offer. But in my opinion, she was not really anti-modernist.” 

Wishart agrees that Jewett balanced her concern for upholding the past with a healthy taste for the modern. “She was part of a greater movement of Colonial Revivalism, wanting to preserve the past but also living very much in the present,” she said.

Jewett traveled in cosmopolitan social circles both in Boston and on the Seacoast. In addition to vacationing with Thomas Bailey Aldrich, she was close friends with Portsmouth-born poet Celia Thaxter and Hampton Falls native author Alice Brown. She also knew Henry James, whose brother William had a house in the area.
“It was a haven both of literature and of visual arts,” Sherman said of the Seacoast in the late 1800s, noting that Ogunquit had a strong community of American impressionist painters.

Just as Aldrich would influence great authors like Mark Twain, Jewett clearly influenced future writers—especially women authors. A notable example was Willa Cather, who followed Jewett’s advice to focus on her experiences growing up in Virginia and Nebraska in her novel “O Pioneers!”

Sherman said Jewett’s work emphasized compassion and openness to other people. In her 1989 biography of the author, she writes that Jewett, like Harriet Beecher Stowe before her, was “looking for ways to express in literary terms what were women’s experiences and women’s values. What is the kind of cultural work that women perform, and that work is also a kind of emotional work,” she said.

In addition to the performances, Pontine will offer a six-week workshop from May 19 to June 23, with sessions on Tuesday evenings from 5:45 to 7:15 p.m. The workshop will prepare participants for a community presentation on the weekend of June 26 to 28 at the Sarah Orne Jewett House.

After months of preparation, Mathews and Gathers hope their performance will leave a lasting impression similar to the impression the Seacoast left on Jewett and her writing. She died of a stroke at the age of 59 in the same house where she was born. But many of her musings on the place where she lived and died still seem perfectly appropriate a full century later.

“The thought of Dunnet Landing will always bring to me long quiet days, and reading on the rocks by the sea, the fresh salt air, and the glory of the sunsets,” Mathews intones toward the end of the play, “the wail of the Sunday psalm-singing at church, the yellow lichen growing over the trees, the houses, and the stone walls; boating and wandering ashore; how kind everyone was.”

Pontine Theatre will perform “Dunnet Landing Stories” from April 24 to May 10 at West End Studio Theatre, 959 Islington St., Portsmouth. Performances are Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m., with a 4 p.m. matinee on Saturday, April 25. Tickets are $25; $20 for the April 25 matinee. Tickets are available online at www.pontine.org. For more information, call 603-436-6660 or e-mail This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it