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The author of the novel The Country of the Pointed Firs, Sarah Orne Jewett, born in 1849, was widely read at the turn of the century, much less after the First World War. Now that a selection of her works is in the Library of America series, perhaps she will be read again.

Sarah Orne Jewett was a New Englander, descended from a well-to-do merchant family in South Berwick, Maine. Her father was a doctor with a local practice (although he later became Professor of Obstetrics at Bowdoin), and she was brought up as one of an extended family in the ‘great house’ of her grandfather Jewett in South Berwick. It was a place of hospitality where she could listen to the stories told at leisure by visitors, among them superannuated sea captains and ship owners and relatives from the lonely inland farms.

As a child she was not a great scholar, preferring hopscotch and skating and her collections of woodchucks, turtles, and insects. ‘In those days,’ she wrote, ‘I was given to long childish illnesses, to instant drooping if ever I were shut up in school,’ so that her father, trusting in fresh air as a cure, took her with him on his daily rounds, teaching her at the same time to keep her eyes open, and telling her the names of plants and animals. He recommended her to read (in her teens) Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, Milton’s L’Allegro, and the poetry of Tennyson and Matthew Arnold. Her mother and grandmother advised Pride and Prejudice, George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Pearl of Orr’s Island.

In 1867, Jewett graduated from Berwick Academy with serious thoughts of studying medicine. The echo of her debate with herself can be heard in her novel A Country Doctor (1884). Nancy Price, ‘not a commonplace girl,’ has been left alone in the world. Her guardian is the beloved country practitioner Dr Leslie, whose principle is ‘to work with nature and not against it.’ He believes the wild, reckless little girl is born to be a doctor, and he turns out to be right. Although on a visit away from home she meets a young lawyer to whom she is in every way suited, she gives him up. In the face of criticism from nearly everyone in her small-town community, she goes back to her medical training.

Jewett herself never had to face the test of society’s disapproval. She gave up the idea of becoming a doctor simply because she was not well enough. Rheumatism became a familiar enemy, tormenting her all her life long. A legacy from her grandfather meant that she would never have to earn a living, and she decided against marriage, perhaps because she felt she was not likely to meet anyone to match her father. But her writing, which had begun with small things—stories for young people, occasional poems, and so forth—had become by 1873 ‘my work—my business, perhaps; and it is so much better than making a mere amusement of it, as I used to.’

Like so many great invalids of the nineteenth century, Jewett continued, with amazing fortitude, to travel, to make new friends, to move according to the seasons from one house to another. Wherever she went she answered letters in the morning and wrote in the afternoons. For twenty years she spent the summer and winter months with Mrs Annie Fields (it was one of those close friendships known as ‘Boston marriages’) and spring and autumn in ‘the great house’ in South Berwick, making time, however, for trips to Europe to meet pretty well everyone she admired. In July 1889 she visited Alice Longfellow (the daughter of the poet) at Mouse Island, in Boothbay Harbor, Maine. This was her first visit to the district of the ‘pointed firs.’ She made several more before 1896, when her novel The Country of the Pointed Firs appeared, first as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly and then in November from the publisher Houghton Mifflin.

This short novel is her masterpiece, no doubt about that, but it is difficult to discuss the plot because it can hardly be said to have one. Dunnet Landing is ‘a salt-aired, white-clapboarded little town’ on the central coast of Maine, more attractive than the rest, perhaps, but much like them. ‘One evening in June, a single passenger landed upon the steamboat wharf.’ She is a writer who has taken a lodging in the town, in search of peace and quiet. Her landlady, Mrs Almira Todd, is the local herbalist, being a very large person, majestic almost, living in the last little house on the way inland. In a few pages Jewett establishes forever the substantial reality of Dunnet Landing. We know it, we have been there, we have walked up the steep streets, we taste the sea air. Now we have got to get to know the inhabitants, slowly, as the narrator does herself, and, in good time, to hear their confidences. Jewett knew all about fishing and small-holding and cooking haddock chowder, about birds, weather, tides, and clouds. She had a wonderful ear for the Maine voice, breaking the immense silences. She quotes, more than once, what her father said to her: ‘Don’t write about things and people. Tell them just as they are.’ And she understood the natural history of small communities, where you will find impoverished, lonely people, often old but proud, self-respecting and respected.

The narrator of The Country of the Pointed Firs rents the local schoolhouse, for fifty cents a week, as her study. Here her first visitor, apart from the bees and an occasional sheep pausing to look in at the open door, is Captain Littlepage, an ancient retired shipmaster. His reminiscences are not what we expect: he tells a story of the unseen—a voyage west of Baffin Island which fetched up ‘on a coast which wasn’t laid down or charted’ where the crew saw, or half-saw, the shapes of men through the sea-fog ‘like a place where there was neither living nor dead.’ These were men waiting between this life and the next. Captain Littlepage offers no further explanation, and, indeed, it’s generally felt in Dunnet Landing that he has overset his mind with too much reading, but Mrs Todd, with a sharp look, says that ‘some of them tales hangs together tolerable well.’

Loneliness and hospitality are the two extremes of the hard existence on the coast of Maine. Elijah Tilley, one of the old fishermen, thought of as a ‘plodding man,’ has been a widower for the past eight years. ‘Folks all kept repeating that time would ease me, but I can’t find it does. No, I just miss her the same every day.’ It is his habit to lapse into silence. What more is there to say? Towards the end of her life, Sarah Orne Jewett gave some words of advice to the young Willa Cather: ‘You must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up.’ Otherwise it may remain unexpressed, as it often does in Dunnet Landing.

Joanna, Mrs Todd’s cousin, whose young man threw her over, withdrew to live alone on tiny Shell-heap Island, ‘a dreadful small place to make a world of.’ She had some poultry and a patch of potatoes. But what about company? She must have made do with the hens, her one-time neighbours think: ‘I expect she soon came to making folks of them.’ But Joanna maintained the dignity of loss. She lived, died, and was buried on Shell-heap Island. We are in a world where silence is understood.

When the time comes for the narrator to leave, Mrs Todd, who has become a true friend, hardly speaks all day, ‘except in the briefest and most disapproving way.’ Then she resolutely goes out on an errand, without turning her head. ‘My room looked as empty as the day I came…and I knew how it would seem when Mrs Todd came back and found her lodger gone. So we die before our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end.’

Jewett is an expert in the homely and everyday who gives us every now and then a glimpse of the numinous. (That, perhaps, is why Rudyard Kipling wrote to her about The Country of the Pointed Firs, ‘I don’t believe even you know how good that work is.’) She does this, for instance, in a short story, ‘Miss Tempy’s Watchers.’ Upstairs lies the outworn body of kindly Miss Temperance Dent, while in the kitchen, two of her old friends, keeping vigil before the next day’s funeral, gradually nod off. ‘Perhaps Tempy herself stood near, and saw her own life and its surroundings with new understanding. Perhaps she herself was the only watcher.’ In one of the later Dunnet Landing stories, ‘The Foreigner,’ Mrs Todd observes: ‘You know plain enough there’s something beyond this world: the doors stand wide open.’ There are moments, too, of communication or empathy between friends that go beyond understanding. Friendship, for Sarah Orne Jewett, was the world’s greatest good.

On 3 September 1902, her fifty-third birthday, she was thrown from her carriage when the horse stumbled and fell. She suffered concussion of the spine and never entirely recovered. ‘The strange machinery that writes,’ as she described it, ‘seems broken and confused.’ For long spells she was in fact forbidden by her doctors to read or write, which must have been a cruel deprivation. In 1909 she was back in South Berwick, where she had the last of a series of strokes, and died in the house where she was born.

Books and Company, Winter 1999