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)
With an Introduction by Marjorie Pryse This edition of
The Country of the Pointed Firs makes an 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 seperate section, along with a fourth story belonging to this group and four more tales.
The four Dunnett Landing stories are "A Dunnett Shepheress," "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. In prose of exquisite simplicity, Jewett draws a resonant portrait of people creating and tending bonds of relationship in a landscape buffetted by the forces of isolation as well as nature's severity.
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