A Native of Winby

Sarah Wyman Whitman designed the cover for A Native of Winby and Other Tales in 1893.

Sarah Wyman Whitman was also a stained-glass artist and that influence is visible in many of her book cover designs, here with the gilt flower.

During this time, she was creating fifty-two stained-glass windows and interior design for the Fogg Building at Jewett’s alma mater, Berwick Academy, South Berwick, Maine.

Jewett commissioned Whitman to design a stained-glass window for a Soldier’s Memorial in the building.

“Darling I just want to say how I take it to heart about your thinking of that quatrain on the window, of all things the most beautiful to put there and adding just what I wanted.  I not saying much then but going away and thinking it over and over the morning long.  A.F. [Annie Fields] and I were saying yesterday how we saw now everywhere what you had done for your time!  The guidance of your taste in so many directions the signs of your thought and influence in least details and widest outlooks.  We fell to talking of it all as we drove along and today I can’t help saying it to you with much love as if I never thought it before, and as if this matter of May were Christmas — the only day when New Englanders dare to speak right out!

Yours ever S.O.J.”

Sarah Orne Jewett (Letter to Sarah Wyman Whitman, May c. 1894) MS Am 1743.1 (126), Houghton Library, Harvard University. Transcription by Terry Heller, Coe College.