The Country of the Pointed Firs combines Jewett's classic novella and its four short sequels with nine of her best stories, including five unavailable in any other paperback edition.  They illustrate the range of her literary style and exemplify her interest in the position of women in nineteenth-century America.  Terry Heller's introduction examines the work within the mainstream of American literature, and detailed annotation, as well as a list of the plant and herb lore to which Jewett makes reference, further illuminate these tales.

The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Fiction (Oxford World's Classics)

Sarah Orne Jewett

Oxford University Press

The Situation Of The Story

Joyce Carol Oates

Henry, James

DORIS LESSING

Shirley Jackson

Katherine Anne Porter

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Zora Neale Hurston

RAYMOND CARVER

Estela Portillo Trambley

JOHN UPDIKE

Louise Erdrich

John Cheever

EUDORA WELTY

BERNARD MALAMUD

Bharati, Mukherjee

Anna Lee Walters

John Edgar Wideman

Diana Young

George P. Garrett

Ann Beattie

Toni Cade Bambara

Willa, Cather

Lee K. Abbott

Conrad, Aiken

Charles, Johnson

Gloria Naylor

flannery-o-connor

Anton Pavloviç Çehov

Franz, Kafka

David Herbert, Lawrence

James, Joyce

Edgar-Allan-Poe

Edith, Wharton

Virginia, Woolf

Nathaniel, Hawthorne

Amy, Tan

Mark, Twain

alice-munro

HERMAN, MELVILLE

Stephen, Crane

Elizabeth Spencer

tillie-olsen

William Goyen

TRUMAN CAPOTE

William, Faulkner

Ernest, Hemingway

Ellen Wilbur

REGINALD McKNlGHT

Maria Cruz Viramontes de Marin

Allen Barnett

Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press

A Country Doctor

A country doctor

History

Franklin Classics Trade Press

Excerpt from Chapter 1: “THERE WAS SOMETHING about the coast town of Dunnet which made it seem more attractive than other maritime villages of eastern Maine. Perhaps it was the simple fact of acquaintance with that neighborhood which made it so attaching, and gave such interest to the rocky shore and dark woods, and the few houses which seemed to be securely wedged and tree-nailed in among the ledges by the Landing. These houses made the most of their seaward view, and there was a gayety and determined floweriness in their bits of garden ground; the small-paned high windows in the peaks of their steep gables were like knowing eyes that watched the harbor and the far sea-line beyond, or looked northward all along the shore and its background of spruces and balsam firs. When one really knows a village like this and its surroundings, it is like becoming acquainted with a single person. The process of falling in love at first sight is as final as it is swift in such a case, but the growth of true friendship may be a lifelong affair.”

Country of the Pointed Firs

Literature & Fiction

Classics

Avon/Books

In scene after memorable scene of Sarah Orne Jewett's fictional masterpiece, The Country of Pointed Firs, the Maine-born author recorded what she felt were the rapidly disappearing traditions, manners, and dialect of Maine coast natives at the turn of the twentieth century. In luminous evocations of their lives — a happy family reunion, an old seaman's ghostly vision, a disappointed lover's self-imposed exile, and more — Jewett created startlingly real portraits of individual New Englanders and a warm, humorous, and compassionate vision of the New England character. No less a writer than Willa Cather ranked The Country of the Pointed Firs — with Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — as one of the three American works most likely to achieve permanent recognition. Long overlooked, Sarah Orne Jewett is today widely acknowledged as an American master and The Country of the Pointed Firs as a landmark in the defining of American character and the American experience.

The Country of the Pointed Firs (Dover Thrift Editions: Classic Novels)

United States

Dover Publications

Writing in wonderfully descriptive and fluent prose, Sarah Orne Jewett, best-known for The Country of the Pointed Firs, was early encouraged by her father to write not about things, but to "write the things themselves just as they are." That she did so is clearly evident in this collection of sensitively written stories, regional sketches that celebrate the past, full of clearly delineated characters and carefully detailed natural and domestic settings. Her luminous descriptions of the landscape are apparent in the title story, commonly regarded as her finest single tale. Other stories focus on the rural lives of elderly women and their attempts to live with dignity and security. In "The Town Poor," the characters are resilient in their poverty and compassionate towards those in need. Themes of female friendship in "The Dulham Ladies" and "Miss Tempy's Watchers" are characteristic. This volume also includes "The Foreigner," "Miss Peck's Promotion," "The Passing of Sister Barsett," "Miss Esther's Guest," "The Guests of Mrs. Timms," and "The Courting of Sister Wisby." Widely regarded as the most distinguished American regionalist writer of the 19th century, Sarah Orne Jewett has been rediscovered and acknowledged as an American master. This outstanding collection of her short fiction will delight students of literature and women's studies as well as general readers.

A White Heron and Other Stories (Dover Thrift Editions: Short Stories)

Written in 1896, this book tells a story spanning three months time in the life of a small coastal town called Dunnet Landing in 19th-century Maine. A lone female visitor arrives & finds lodging with the widowed Mrs. Todd, the town s herbalist, who introduces the visitor to many of the town s inhabitants. The visitor s impressions of the people she meets start out simply & then almost invisibly they crescendo into a deep, intense human portrait. In 1925 Willa Cather called this book a masterpiece. This handsomely designed, re-typeset edition is prefaced by a portfolio of photos of coastal Maine during the era portrayed in the story.

The Country of the Pointed Firs

Genre Fiction

Simon&Schuster

Describes the characteristics and care requirements of a variety of shrubs, and recommends specific plants for acidic soils, walls, shade, exposed sites, dry locations, and container gardening

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Gardening & Landscape Design

Tells how to garden in dry areas, recommends drought-resistant plants, and shows how to make the best use of water

Originally published in Scribner’ s, The Cosmopolitan, McClure’ s, and Lippincott’ s, Sarah Orne Jewett’ s stories about Irish immigrant figures constitute a neglected corner of her oeuvre, despite the fact that Jewett herself entertained the possibility of collecting them into a volume to be called Transplanted Shamrocks. Because the proposed collection never appeared, Jewett’ s tales of the Irish in America, stories that constitute an invaluable historical and literary record, appear together for the first time in this anthology. These eight stories represent the first serious treatment of the Irish in America by an important literary figure.After a visit to Ireland in 1882, this superior nineteenth-century New England writer expanded the scope of her interests to provide fictional portraits of the newly arrived Irish population. She told the sometimes happy and more often sad tales of their acculturation in "The Luck of the Bogans" (1889), "A Little Captive Maid" (1891), "Between Mass and Vespers" (1893), "The Gray Mills of Farley" (1898), "Where’ s Nora?" (1898), "Bold Words at the Bridge" (1899), "A Landlocked Sailor" (1899), and" Elleneen" (1901). For Jewett, the Irish comprised a unique and fascinating addition to the New England local color figures it was her life’ s work to represent in literary fiction. She believed the Irish immigrant brought a new vitality and charm to the New England landscape.In their introduction, editors Jack Morgan and Louis A. Renza point out that in these stories Jewett displayed a remarkable empathy for the Irish. Undoing the "Paddy" stereotype favored in nineteenth-century Yankee discourse, Jewett exhibited an understanding of the immigrant psyche unheard of among her fellow writers— including Emerson and Thoreau, both of whom wrote disdainfully of the Irish.Morgan and Renza further discuss the stories in the context of contemporary multicultural and ethnic concerns, showing that Jewett’ s Irish stories demonstrate a renewal— a redefining, questioning, and expanding of cultural boundaries within concentrated American communities, her own New England area in particular. As such, the editors contend, the stories constitute important documents in the history of a country still engaged with the multiethnic as well as the multi-individualist paradox of "E pluribus unum."Above all, however, these stories are touching and deeply felt treatments of subjects dear to her heart by one of our major writers.

The Irish Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett

Southern Illinois University Press

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Books by Sarah Orne Jewett