The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories

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Summary

The Country of Pointed Firs, Sarah Orne Jewett's masterpiece, established her among the consummate stylists of nineteenth-century American fiction. Composed in a series of beautiful web-like sketches, the novel is narrated by a young woman writer who leaves the city to work one summer in the Maine seaport of Dunnet Landing, and stays with the herbalist Mrs Almira Todd. She writes a New England idyll rooted in friendship, particularly female friendship, weaving stories and conversations, imagery of sea, sky and earth, the tang of salt air and aromatic herbs into an organic 'fiction of community' in which themes and form are exquisitely matched. To quote Willa Cather: 'The 'Pointed Fir' sketches are living things caught in the open, with light and freedom and air spaces about them. They melt into the land and the life of the land until they are not stories at all, but life itself'. This edition, introduced by Alison Easton, also includes ten of Sarah Orne Jewett's short stories, among them 'The Queen's Twin', 'The Foreigner' and 'William's Wedding' set in Dunnet Landing.

About the author

Sarah Orne Jewett

Sarah Orne Jewett was born in 1849 into a financially independent, middle-class family in South Berwick, Maine. She went intermittently to a local school, but was mostly self-educated and read voraciously. Inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel set in Maine, The Pearl of Orr's Island, she began to write about her native region of New England. Her first story appeared in 1868 in the Atlantic Monthly, which continued to publish her work. Friendships were of fundamental importance to her, particularly friendships between women. She became part of Boston's cultural elite, and was good friends with her publisher James T. Fields and his wife Annie. After his death in 1881 she moved in with Annie, spending half the year with her around Boston and the other half in the family house in Maine. Her novels include Deephaven (1877) and The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), both of which reveal a sense of community and place, and A Country Doctor (1884), written in memory of her father. She also published nine volumes of short stories between 1879 and 1899. Sarah Orne Jewett incurred serious injuries in 1902 after being thrown from a carriage. This prevented any further writing. She died in 1909.

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