Nation making and fiction making

Abstract

Beside Sarah Orne Jewett's desk where she would have seen it every time she looked up was a small copy of the well-known Raeburn portrait of Sir Walter Scott. No critic has commented on this, yet Scott was important to her. As she remarks in a 1905 letter to her dearest friend and companion, Annie Fields,'How one admires that great man more and more'. 1 So, what was New England's most notable, late-nineteenth-century regional writer's interest in Scott? True, any well-read person would have known Scott's novels: 'To be alive and literate in the nineteenth century was to have been affected in some way by the Waverley novels'. 2 Elsewhere in this volume (Chapter 1) Susan Manning discusses Mark Twain's vexed relation to Scott; the connection between Scott and Jewett is also a complex one. At the end of her long career charting the social, economic and emotional complexities of contemporary New England through her fictions of small local communities, Jewett turned to write 'something entirely different' , The Tory Lover (1901), her historical novel about Patriot/ Loyalist tensions during the American War of Independence. It was Scott, I believe, who helped her negotiate the complexities of this civil conflict in the creating of nations. 3 I want to argue that this was not simply some vague influence diffused through popular, partial views of Scott's novels, but was based on a more thoughtful reading that may also help us with the vexed question of how Jewett positioned herself socially and politically in her fictions. Starting in the winter of 1777-78 when Independence still hung in the balance, the action of The Tory Lover takes place in Maine, France and England. Although Jewett originally intended to focus on John Paul Jones (who commanded the new republic's first ship and who appears in her