A Marsh Island

Sarah Orne Jewett

A Marsh Island (1885) by Sarah Orne Jewett is a gentle yet vivid tale of life in a small New England coastal community that follows the adventures of Dale, a Manhattanite landscape painter in the Great Marsh of northeastern Massachusetts. 

One of Jewett’s lesser known works and “the first American gay novel” according to lecturer Dr. Don James Brown. A Marsh Island details the story of a love triangle, in which all of the characters involved seek to, in one way or another, to flee from conventional marital life.

Told through rich, naturalistic detail, the novel follows the intertwined lives of islanders who live in harmony with the rhythms of nature, exploring themes of queerness, friendship, tradition, and the quiet beauty of everyday life.

In conversation with

Dorian Stuber is a passionate reader who now lives in St Louis. He is the co-host of the podcast One Bright Book and, because he is old-school, keeps up a blog about books with the ungainly but personal title Eigermonchjungfrau. For 20+ years he was an English professor, most recently at Hendrix College in Conway, AR, where he taught everything from composition to literary modernism to how to write a great personal statement. His area of specialization is Holocaust literature and he has written and taught extensively on the topic, including regular work with the Levine Institute of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.

Rebecca Hussey is a teacher, writer, and critic living in Connecticut. She is on the board of the National Book Critics Circle and serves as Vice-President of Technology and Membership. Her writing has appeared in Full Stop, the Kenyon Review, Atmospheric Quarterly, the Rumpus, and more.

Frances Evangelista is an educator in Washington DC with a history of leading literacy initiatives in Title 1 urban schools. She blogged about her own reading life at Nonsuch Book for over a decade, currently podcasts at One Bright Book, and has contributed to a variety of literary judging and nonprofit support systems.