Jewett: Novels and Stories

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.

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.

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!!!

The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896)(Sarah Orne Jewett 1849-1909)Okay, the time has finally come for me to make a horrible personal admission. I've had a secret for years 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 acknowledge how sketchy it all appears. Nor do I imagine my case will be helped if I state that I most often enjoy said beverage on Sunday nights during Booknotes on CSPAN, though as a general matter I do occasionally partake when I sit down to read, after we get the kids to bed. There--I've said it--that monkey's off my back. Why here? Why now? Because, this book may be the sine qua non of tea-sipping books.Perhaps the central theme that we've been developing over the course of these reviews is the existence of a fundamental tension in human affairs, between the basically feminine desire for security and the basically masculine desire for freedom. We've examined many examples of the latter--everything from Huckleberry Finn to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest--but good examples of the former have been rarer, presumably because I just read fewer women authors. (Though we have found some good examples, try particularly the review of The House of Gentle Men) Now we come to Sarah Orne Jewett's lovely short novel, The Country of Pointed Firs, and the very essence of the book is the value of friendship (particularly female friendship), community, and continuity in providing an atmosphere of 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 fictional town of Dunnett Landing on the coast of Maine. There she is adopted into a loose knit group of women who weave a web of stories about the town, the surrounding islands and the folks who live, or lived, there. This narrative tradition and the time spent in each others company take on the quality of ritual, and in light of their dismissal of the local pastor, a nearly religious ritual. In addition, Jewett's comparisons of the women to figures out of Greek drama and classical myth gives them a timeless quality. Most of all, there is her portrayal of the women as a phenomenon of Nature, arising organically 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 similar communities across time and space. The term that has apparently been adopted to describe this kind of novel is "fiction of community," and that's a perfect description. There's something wonderfully comforting about the togetherness, shared sense of experience and the act of communal memory that Jewett's stories summon.The flip side of this however is that the n

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 meaningful relationships and good days alongside sorrowful days. Her style is pleasant yet literary. I recommend this book as a refreshing break from the cares of year 2000!