“It seemed … she never had been alive … before she came to live at the farm.”

Despite having published in the Atlantic Monthly before, and being close friends with both the editor and his wife, Sarah Orne Jewett’s “A White Heron” was not considered suitable for the magazine. Fortunately for readers and now listeners, Jewett had faith in her story; she even wrote to the editor’s wife in a letter, “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 so this classic collection, A White Heron and Other Stories, came to be.

The nine stories in this collection encapsulate Jewett’s love and reverence for nature; her affinity for understanding complex, nuanced, and often strained relationships; and—just as her father encouraged her—her ability to write not about things but to “write the things themselves just as they are.”

Full Contents:

“A White Heron”
“The Gray Man”
“Farmer Finch”
“Marsh Rosemary”
“The Dulham Ladies”
“A Business Man”
“Mary and Martha”
“The News from Petersham”
“The Two Browns”