1877 Deephaven

As with her first published story, “Jennie Garrow’s Lovers,” Jewett frames her first novel with a narrator who speaks to the reader directly, but here the narrator has a vested interest in the action and the reader feels the pulse of Jewett the writer.

Jewett intended the book to communicate a moral, as spoken by protagonist Kate Lancaster in Part 13, “success and happiness are not things of chance with us, but of choice.”

“Deephaven” was a success. For a second edition in 1893, Jewett’s friends Marcia Oakes Woodbury and Charles Woodbury create illustrations like the one seen here.