Product Description
This reproduction was printed from a digital file created at the Library of Congress as part of an extensive scanning effort started with a generous donation from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.The Library is pleased to offer much of its public domain holdings free of charge online and at a modest price in this printed format.Seeing these older volumes from our collections rediscovered by new generations of readers renews our own passion for books and scholarship. ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document, covering the life and work of (Theodora) Sarah Orne Jewett, is an entry from Contemporary Authors, a reference volume published by Thompson Gale. The length of the entry is 6426 words. The page length listed above is based on a typical 300-word page. Although the exact content of each entry from this volume can vary, typical entries include the following information:

• Place and date of birth and death (if deceased)
• Family members
• Education
• Professional associations and honors
• Employment
• Writings, including books and periodicals
• A description of the author's work
• References to further readings about the author

Product Description
All of Jewett's best fiction, including her three novels,"Deephaven," "A Country Doctor," and "The Country of the PointedFirs," and 28 funny, satirical, and poignant sketches and stories. Setagainst long Maine winters, hardscrabble farms, and the sea, Jewett'sstories of gruff, capable farmers and seafolk--and of the rewards andtrials of family and communal ties--have a very modern resonance. Thiscomprehensive collection reveals the full stature of the unjustlyneglected writer Willa Cather ranked with Mark Twain and NathanielHawthorne. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Great for a rainy summer afternoon
I fell on Country of the Pointed Firs by Jewett wholly by accident while perusing the library shelves.Being a stodgy, older white guy I could have easily passed this one up.
While I consider myself fairly well-read I had never heard of Sarah Orne Jewett.
She was a very percetive and observant journalist.Sociologists and historians should be pleased that her careful recordings of everyday life remain.Feminists should be especially pleased that the life, aspirations and dreams of everday women survive from an era dominated by male writers.
I bought this wonderful Library of America edition to keep at my cabin, right next to Thoureau's Walden and Kingsolver' Prodigal Summer.

Heavenly Prose of the late 1800's
Sarah Orne Jewett is exquisite in her poetic prose. This collection of short novels has kept me intrigued. It's been like a visit back to the life of young exploration to the late 1800's. I've enjoyed her writing very much.

A pleasure to read
Wonderful, delightful human stories. Sarah immerses you on these places, people and environments in such an intense way you just can't believe they're fictional!!!

comforting place to visit
The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896)(Sarah Orne Jewett1849-1909)

Okay, the time has finally come for me to make a horrible personal admission.I've had a secret foryears now, one that strikes right to the core of my manhood : of an evening, I enjoy a nice cup of tea. Actually, it's an enormous mug and I steep the tea until it looks like coffee, but I still acknowledgehow sketchy it all appears.Nor do I imagine my case will be helped if I state that I most often enjoysaid beverage on Sunday nights during Booknotes on CSPAN, though as a general matter I dooccasionally partake when I sit down to read, after we get the kids to bed.There--I've said it--thatmonkey's off my back.Why here?Why now?Because, this book may be the sine qua non oftea-sipping books.

Perhaps the central theme that we've been developing over the course of these reviews is the existenceof a fundamental tension in human affairs, between the basically feminine desire for security and thebasically masculine desire for freedom.We've examined many examples of the latter--everythingfrom Huckleberry Finn to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest--but good examples of the former havebeen rarer, presumably because I just read fewer women authors.(Though we have found some goodexamples, try particularly the review of The House of Gentle Men)Now we come to Sarah OrneJewett's lovely short novel, The Country of Pointed Firs, and the very essence of the book is the valueof friendship (particularly female friendship), community, and continuity in providing an atmosphereof security and a bulwark against the encroachments of a changing world.

The semiautobiographical novel tells of a young woman writer spending a summer in the fictionaltown of Dunnett Landing on the coast of Maine.There she is adopted into a loose knit group ofwomen who weave a web of stories about the town, the surrounding islands and the folks who live, orlived, there.This narrative tradition and the time spent in each others company take on the quality ofritual, and in light of their dismissal of the local pastor, a nearly religious ritual.In addition, Jewett'scomparisons of the women to figures out of Greek drama and classical myth gives them a timelessquality.Most of all, there is her portrayal of the women as a phenomenon of Nature, arisingorganically from, and blending into, the rugged landscape.

The effect of all of this is that as the women speak they seem to be tapping into an eternal tradition. Their voices and stories summoning echoes from the past, not just of Dunnett Landing, but of similarcommunities across time and space.The term that has apparently been adopted to describe this kind ofnovel is "fiction of community," and that's a perfect description.There's something wonderfullycomforting about the togetherness, shared sense of experience and the act of communal memory thatJewett's stories summon.

The flip side of this however is that the novel, not surprisingly since it is so clearly a response toclassic masculine fiction, suffers from some inevitable weaknesses when judged by those standards.Itis almost totally formless and plotless, being little more than a collection of reminiscences.Itcelebrates stasis rather than progress and at some level reflects a genuine and unhealthy fear of humandevelopment in general, and of industrialization specifically.Though relentlessly good natured, thereis a marked indifference or even hostility to traditional religion.Politics and economics arecompletely, and unrealistically, absent from the scene.

Just as the "action" of the novel occurs at the very edge of the nation, figuratively outside the boundsof late 19th Century America, so the community it describes is a utopian one that is an alternative toour actual Western culture.Ultimately, that utopia, like most, seems like it might be a nice place tovisit but like it would prove stultifying to the human spirit, the longing to discover and to achieve, thedesire of the young to create their own place in the world rather than to simply assume a bequeathedplace in their parent's.There's always something comforting about maternal unconditional love, butwe prefer it in smaller doses; too much becomes cloying and suffocating.

The Country of the Pointed Firs is a comforting place to visit--try it with a big mug of tea by yourside--but it's not a place you'd want to live.

GRADE: B

Refreshing
Sarah Orne Jewett writes with simplicity and sweetness. She writes of her beloved New England. She presents a world of time past, a world in which the people are good, and life is a pleasant journey with meaningfulrelationships and good days alongside sorrowful days. Her style is pleasantyet literary.I recommend this book as a refreshing break from the caresof year 2000! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Brief Glimpse Into Jewett's Life
Sarah Orne Jewett lived in Maine from 1849-1909.Noted for her local color writing, she is featured in this book which is based on a film of her life.
The old photos show scenes from Maine, each accompanied by a paragraph relating the photo to Jewett's life or her various books.Readers of Country of the Pointed Firs or other Jewett titles will find this quick intro to her life expands their understanding of her writing.
Jewett never married and lived her whole life in a small village (South Berwick) in Maine in the same house where she was born.Possibly if she'd lived today, she would be considered a feminist, as she was quite independent for a woman in the 1800s. ... Read more

Product Description
The first collection of the author's stories about Irish immigrants, originally published in several magazines between 1889 and 1901, contains eight tales representing the first serious treatment of its subject by an important literary figure. UP. ... Read more

Product Description
The tale of Demeter and Persephone, a central myth of Victorian women's culture, is used to interpret the life and work of a 19th-century Maine writer. ... Read more

Product Description
A writer comes one summer to Dunnet Landing, a Maine seacoast town, where she follows the lonely inhabitants of once-prosperous coastal towns. Here, lives are molded by the long Maine winters, rock-filled fields and strong resourceful women.

... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Summer Idyll
Sarah Orne Jewett was a gifted writer, one who could easily afford to demand what she wanted from editors since she did not have to rely upon her earnings to support her.She wrote unflinchingly about the strength that lies in women's relationships and her stories feel as if they have naturally drifted out of the oral tradition."The Country of the Pointed Firs" is a lyrical journey through one Maine summer in a dying coastal town with all its highs and lows.

Told by an unnamed narrator, "The Country of the Pointed Firs" reads more like a series of short stories than a complete novella.The narrator, a writer who is spending the summer in the coastal town of Dunnet boarding with the inimitable Mrs. Todd, finds herself easily accepted into the lives of these easygoing townsfolk.She relates tales of her landlord, the local medicine woman, and of Mrs. Todd's family - her older brother William who has been courting the same woman for years on end, and her elderly but still sprightly mother who is beloved by all.Through her association with Mrs. Todd, the narrator comes to know the strange tales that seafaring folk have learned to tell and the sadness that has come to a town where the livelihood that once suppoted them has all but died out.

"The Country of the Pointed Firs" is a fast-paced enjoyable read, yet is not a novella that is cohesive (beyong the fact that the episodes are loosely connected by those who tell them).This can make for disjointed reading at times, and Jewett often uses the same phrase repeatedly - perhaps for emphasis - but sometimes it seems tired.Still, this novella is a unique look at what life in coastal Maine was like at the turn of the twentieth century and can definitely be read as the ancestor to later lonely tales that take place within the same region.

Great Writer
Sarah Orne Jewett's name has to be searched for on the book, and yet this fine author is one of the 20 best writers in the last century of American literature. The small paperback needs to be read slowly and gently; it is too good to read otherwise. ... Read more