Tragedy

On her fifty-third birthday, Jewett was thrown from a carriage and suffered long-term and painful injuries, effectively curtailing her professional writing until her death in 1909.

No longer able to write productively, Jewett mentored other artists and writers, notably Willa Cather. Cather considered Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs one of the three most important American novels, alongside The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, and The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne.