Dec 25, 2009

A White Heron | Critical Overview

In his 1962 Sarah Orne Jewett, the first booklength study devoted to the writer, Richard Cary identified Sylvia’s rite of initiation as ‘‘an arduous journey of self-discovery and maturity.’’ This theme of the rite of passage was explored by critics over the next three decades. Catherine B. Sherman read the story as a miniature Bildungsroman, a story of the development of a young person into adulthood, along the lines of Charles Dickens’s