Sarah Orne Jewett: The Country of the Pointed Firs

The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett is one of the most loveable and pleasure-giving novels in the American canon: the story of a writer who leaves her home in Boston for what she thinks will be a solitude-filled summer-long “working” vacation at Dunnet Landing, a (fictional) “Down East” Maine fishing village. The atmosphere and texture of the place, the town with its “rocky shore and dark woods and houses, securely wedged and tree nailed in among the granite ledges” is evoked so easily and naturally and with such intimacy that it comes to feel uncannily like one that the reader herself knows. The “Landing” becomes a kind of dream home for the reader. Once visited, it is never forgotten.

Published in 1896, Country of the Pointed Firs was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. It is written in an utterly beguiling prose that is at once poetic and lyrical while also being as refined and spare as Shaker furniture. The book was praised by contemporary critics and Jewett’s literary peers, including both William James and Henry James.

In later years, Country of the Pointed Firs was championed by Willa Cather (Jewett’s most prominent protégé), Elizabeth Bishop, and Ursula Le Guin, who named it as one of her favorite novels of all time. Cather ranked the book as one the very greatest of American novels, placing it alongside Huckleberry Finn and The Scarlet Letter.

Among many memorable characters, we will meet female hermits, at least two wise witches (a type appearing regularly in Jewett’s work), ghosts and the aged sea captain who has seen them, a widowed fisherman who loves to knit and keep house, and a man who is “both son and daughter” to his mother. We encounter no marriage plot, no melodramas of manhood under siege. In their place we find a book concerned with the deep significance of everyday life. Jewett’s insistence that we look and look again at the everyday, the minor, and the small is a way of asking readers to regard these categories differently.

The Country of the Pointed Firs raises the question: Is “everyday” life ever really ordinary? Many feminist critics have named Dunnet Landing a “female-centered utopia.” In her novels and stories Jewett develops a feminist approach to ecology, relations between the sexes, and to forms of knowledge, subtly critiquing patriarchal views on society.

Text
Sarah Orne Jewett: Novels and Stories, Edited by Michael Davitt Bell, Library of America

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