A wonderful book! But too little known - always a rare personal
discovery, published in 1896 and occasionally re-issued, The
Country of the Pointed Firs has always been hard to track down, in
England certainly. This timely re-printing gives new readers the
luck of discovering what various fellow writers (Kipling, Willa
Cather, Henry James among them) have rated a masterpiece. 'One
evening in June a single passenger landed upon the steamboat
wharf.' The narrator, a writer, has come to Dunnet, a village on
the coast of Maine, for working quiet. At once we too are caught by
the scene itself - the bright sun, the sparkling air, the sweet
smell of herbs and grasses, but also the dark woods (those pointed
firs!) the cliffs, the rocky shore, the abiding sound of wind and
sea. Something of that contrast is in the people themselves, mostly
solitaries - widows of seamen, seamen widowers, who live in the
small white scattered cottages. A peaceful unwordly haven? Yes, but
it holds strange personal tales, partly caught in haunting or
teasing fragments. And the nameless visitor - listener, observer,
sometimes companion on some zestful expedition - is the medium
through which secrets and memories rise to the narrative surface.
Thus, the book's impressive central figure Mrs Almira Todd (with
whom the writer lodges), herb-gatherer and herbal healer, spirit of
goodness, still feels sharp pangs, not only for her drowned young
husband Nathan but for the real love of her life, prevented from
marrying by his parents. 'My heart was gone out of my keeping
before I ever saw Nathan, though he loved me well and made me real
happy'. It was, in the narrator's words, 'an absolute archaic
grief. She might have been Antigone alone on the Theban plain.'
Perhaps the most memorable story comes from Captain Littlepage, a
man of worn and troubled refinement, with a tale of Coleridgean
awe. Wrecked in the Arctic he was given rough shelter by an old
seaman, Guffett, lone survivor of a polar voyage. 'There is a
strange sort of country,' Guffett told him, 'way up north beyond
the ice, and strange folk living in it... Shapes of folks, all
blowing grey figures.' He described how he and a fellow sailor
followed one of the 'fog-shaped men... going along slow among the
rocks. But Lord! he fluttered away out o' sight like a leaf the
wind takes with it, or a piece of cobweb. They would make as if
they talked together, but there was no sound of voices. Say what
you like, 'twas a kind of waiting place between this world and the
next.' Sorrow and wonder, yes. But the prevailing note of the book
is one of exhilaration; each day has its bright unexpected events,
and the whole, in which so much is learnt, seems part of a quest.
When you end, you re-read. As a bonus, you will also find in this
edition a restored lost chapter, several short stories, and the
effective black-and-white pictures of an early edition. It's a
treasure - not to be missed. (Kirkus UK)
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.
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