The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories

Sarah Orne Jewett

oct 1995 · Penguin UK

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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.

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Theodora Sarah Orne Jewett was born in South Berwick, Maine on September 3, 1849. Unable to attend school because of arthritis, she learned about coastal life in New England as she accompanied her father, a doctor, on his rounds. He encouraged both her reading and her writing. When she began submitting fiction in 1867, using the pseudonyms A. D. Eliot, Alice Eliot, and Sarah C. Sweet, her chosen topic was often the life and people of her native, rural Maine. Her first published story appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1869 and her first short story collection, Deephaven, was published in 1877. Her first novel, A Country Doctor was published in 1884. Her other works include A Marsh Island (1885), A White Heron and Other Stories (1886), A Native of Winby (1893), Tales of New England (1894) and The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896). She stopped writing in 1902, after a fall left her with severe head injuries. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage on June 24, 1909.