The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories: xxiii (Penguin Classics)

by Sarah Orne Jewett (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  1995

  $17.96

  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.

• New

  Paperback
  1994

  $23.80

  This edition of The Country of the Pointed Firs makes the American classic available in the form in which it was originally published in 1896. An edition published after the author's death had incorporated three Dunnett Landing stories into the novel as additional chapters; these stories appear here in a separate section, along with a fourth story belonging to this group and four more tales. The four Dunnett Landing stories are A Dunnett Shepherdess, The Foreigner, The Queen's Twin, and William's Wedding ; the four additional tales are A White Heron, Miss Tempy's Watchers, Martha's Lady, and Aunt Cynthy Dallett. Here in the fictional town of Dunnett's Landing on the coast of Maine, Sarah Orne Jewett introduces people-now mostly women, as many of the town's men have been lost at sea or moved away in this era of whaling's decline-who have lived next to the sea for generations and seem to share its strength, silence and mystery.