Sara “Sally” Norton

“…One feels how easy it is for friends to slip away out of this world and leave us lonely. And such good days as you have had are too good to be looked for often. There is something transfiguring in the best of friendship.” Sarah Orne Jewett (Letter to Sara Norton, September 3)

Sara “Sally” Norton was of the Boston elite, the eldest daughter of Harvard art professor Charles E. Norton and niece of James Russell Lowell, the founding editor at The Atlantic Monthly.

She was invited to 148 Charles Street and Gambrel Cottage with some frequency. Sally Norton also visited Jewett’s South Berwick home. Jewett visited the Nortons at their Cambridge home Shady Hill and at their vacation residence Ashfield, in the Berkshires.