The Country of the Pointed Firs

The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), a representative work by the American woman writer Sarah Orne Jewett, is a classic of American regional literature. The novel unfolds in the first person: a middle-aged woman writer, seeking quiet, rents lodgings in the small coastal Maine town of Dunnet Landing and spends a summer writing in an old schoolhouse. The book has no strong plot running through it; instead, it consists of a series of loosely connected chapters. The narrator meets her warm, talkative landlady, Mrs. Todd—a country philosopher nearing seventy who is devoted to herbs and walks outdoors all year round; she goes out to sea with her to visit old Mrs. Todd on an offshore island and her taciturn but sincere brother William; she listens to the aged captain sing of his seafaring past; she attends the great Bowden family gathering, where scattered relatives reunite once a year; and she visits the lonely dwelling of the hermit Joanna. The shipping boom of earlier days has receded, the men's ambitions and disappointments have sunk into daily life, and the women sustain this small world with endurance, restraint, and mutual support. With poetic language and an unhurried pace, Jewett blends rocky shores, spruces, pointed firs, sea fog, and the inner lives of the townspeople into a portrait of a local life that is passing away. The work is praised as an American classic alongside The Scarlet Letter and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and was held in high regard by Henry James, Kipling, and others.