Sarah Orne Jewett

Posting on 4/25/10 about Willa Cather reminded me of Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909), a pioneer who influenced Cather by her example of writing about women's lives and concerns, and writing vividly and lovingly about rural and small town life and about nature. Jewett lived in various places in New England, especially Maine, and her novels and stories are set in New England as well. Unfortunately some have used this fact to label her as "merely" a sort of quaint "regional" writer; she was in fact much more than that. (Who labels William Faulkner, for example, whose work is mostly set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, as merely a regional writer?) Jewett's most well-known novel is "The Country of the Pointed Firs" (1896), more a collection of sketches than a traditional novel, but carefully constructed for all that (despite later insertions of related short stories by various editors). The main character and narrator is an unnamed woman writer who goes to the small village of Dunnet Landing to work on her writing, and soon gets involved with the lives and stories of the local people, especially the women. In some ways this book reminds me of the English writer Elizabeth Gaskell's "Cranford," which I wrote about here on 4/20/10; both take place in very small towns, and tell the stories of their various inhabitants, mostly women, especially older women, in a low-key way that soon draws readers in. Both novels could be labeled "gentle," but that adjective should not be allowed to minimize the way that both - in their understated ways - include some dramatic events and compelling characters, and should not allow us to dismiss the emotions and relationships of those characters. Jewett's writing is not for everyone, as some may find it old-fashioned. But I find "The Country of the Pointed Firs" a lovely book full of human interest as well as beautifully descriptive observations of New England landscapes.