> Skip to content
  • Published: 26 October 1995
  • ISBN: 9780140434767
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $36.00

The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories




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.

  • Published: 26 October 1995
  • ISBN: 9780140434767
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $36.00

Other books in the series

Maldoror and Poems
On Sparta
Love
Annals
Military Dispatches