Book description
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.
