For the most part, fortune was kind to Jewett. Born on September 3, 1849, into a prosperous and stable family in South Berwick, Maine, she was the second of three daughters of Theodore H. Jewett, a country physician, and Caroline F. Perry.
She was born to an old New England family, replete with the types of characters that appear in her stories-- sea captains, independent women, and country doctors. Jewett's early life was very much like the one she sketches in her novel A Country Doctor; Jewett and Nan Prince share the characteristics of an independent childhood followed by an unconventional womanhood. Jewett was raised with tons of books in and around her home; she was virtually fed on words. It seems only natural that she should be drawn to write. Her mother was Caroline Frances and her father was Theodore Herman Jewett (23).
Jewett demonstrated an early inclination toward writing; she published her first story in 1868 when she was just eighteen, and she enjoyed a long and productive career. Championed by such influential editors as William Dean Howells and Horace Scudder, Jewett's work was regularly featured in The Atlantic Monthly and shrewdly marketed by the publisher Houghton Mifflin for three and a half decades.
She produced fifteen novels or collections for adults as well as several works for children and carved out a comfortable niche for herself in the competitive literary marketplace of post-Civil War America. Claiming to have no talent for plot, Jewett perfected the art of the short story as a nondramatic exploration of what she called the "romance" of "every-day life."