A White Heron and Other Stories

Sarah Wyman Whitman designed the book cover for Sarah Orne Jewett’s A White Heron (1885).

In a letter to her partner Annie Fields, Jewett recounted that William Dean Howells, Jewett’s editor at The Atlantic Monthly, had discouraged her about the story, remarking that “this age frowns on the romantic.” Jewett continued, “but what shall I do with my “White Heron” now she is written? She isn’t a very good magazine story, but I love her, and I mean to keep her for the beginning of my next book and the reason for Mrs. Whitman’s pretty cover.”

Sarah Orne Jewett (Letter to Annie Fields, undated. c. 1885), Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett, Edited by Annie Fields, 1911