Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1877.

Third edition, published the same year as the first. Jewett’s first published book, centred on the friendship of two young girls, and is likely inspired by the life of Kate DiCosta Birckhead, Jewett’s friend in real life who she was deeply in love with. In Deephaven the girls dream of escaping, they say, like the Ladies of Llangollen, two famous 19th century Irish women who fled to English estate in order to live more freely as a lesbian couple, and who also in their pursuit of that freedom, inspired writers and artists, but also became somewhat of an unfortunate tourist attraction.

The fictional town of Deephaven was inspired by Jewett's own hometown of South Berwick, Maine. "Stimulated by Harriet Beecher Stowe's sympathetic depiction of her state's local color, [Jewett] was determined to follow her in recording the life of the dwindling farms and deserted shipless harbors... [her] precise, charmingly subdued vignettes of the gently perishing glory of the Maine countryside and ports have won her a place among the most important writers of the local-color school, and she was a significant influence on the writing of Willa Cather" (OCAL).

In a letter to a friend in 1885, Jewett would later write: “How seldom a book comes that stirs the minds and hearts of the good men and women of such a village as this, for instance. One might say that they are not readers by nature or that they do not get their learning in this way, but the truth must be recognized that few books are written for and from their standpoint. That they have read certain books proves that they would read others if they had them. And whoever adds to this department of literature will do an inestimable good, will see that a simple, helpful way of looking at life and speaking the truth about it—“To see life steadily, and see it whole,” as Matthew Arnold says—in what we are pleased to call its everyday aspects must bring out the best sort of writing. My dear father used to say to me very often, “Tell things just as they are!””

Small 8vo., green cloth lettered in black to upper cover, with decorative border and cornerpieces embossed in black; duplicated in blind to lower; bulrush device in gilt to upper board; spine fully decorated in gilt and black; black coated endpapers; all edges red; pp. [x], 255, [iii]; strong lean to text block, rubbed along spine, particularly at head and foot; evidence of sticker being removed from front paste-down; previous owner’s name in pencil to front free endpaper; lower hinge cracked with webbing showing; sporadic brown staining to the first 50 pages; a good copy, only, of this important work.