The Country of the Pointed Firs and Selected Short Fiction
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In the mid-1880s, Jewett began to produce the works she is remembered for today, though she had already attained considerable financial success through the publication of her work in prestigious literary magazines and in books issued by major publishers ( James R. Osgood and Company and, later, Houghton Mifflin and Company, and, for one book, G. P. Putnam’s Sons). Her published works through 1885 were Deephaven (1877); a book for children, Play Days (1878); Country By-Ways (1881); two short-story collections, Old Friends and New (1879) and The Mate of the Daylight, and Friends Ashore (1884); and the novels A Country Doctor (1884) and A Marsh Island (1885) (the latter had been originally serialized in the Atlantic Monthly).
In 1886, Jewett’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin, issued her collection of short fiction A White Heron, and Other Stories; the title story from that book remains not only Jewett’s best-known work of short fiction but also among the most anthologized short stories by any nineteenth-century American author. Also featuring the popular Jewett story “The Dulham Ladies,” A White Heron, and Other Stories constituted a major advance for Jewett, as the finest stories in that collection marked her emergence as arguably the most skilled among writers of American regional local color fiction. Subtler and more carefully crafted than her earlier work, those 1886 short stories and several later ones by Jewett—along with her classic novel The Country of the Pointed Firs, a book published in 1896 after being serialized in the Atlantic Monthly—would secure for the author a central position in American literary history as an important transitional figure who transcended the limitations of the local color movement by producing literary work that both chronicled and universalized one American region and its human culture.
Not all of her works published between A White Heron, and Other Stories and The Country of the Pointed Firs were among Jewett’s most noteworthy efforts, however. Two books intended for younger readers—The Story of the Normans (1887; her only book published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons), an impressionistic account of the Norman invasion, and the novel Betty Leicester: A Story for Girls (1890)—are seldom read today. Nevertheless, the latter book foreshadows The Country of the Pointed Firs in that both novels chronicle the interactions between “outsider” protagonists and rural Maine folk, with both “insiders” and “outsiders” mutually benefiting from the experience. (Betty Leicester was followed in 1894 by a sequel, Betty Leicester’s English Christmas: A New Chapter of an Old Story.)
Between The Story of the Normans and The Country of the Pointed Firs, Jewett published four new collections of short stories: The King of Folly Island, and Other People (1888), Strangers and Wayfarers (1890), A Native of Winby, and Other Tales (1893), and The Life of Nancy (1895). These collections contain some of her most memorable efforts in the short-story form, from “The Courting of Sister Wisby” (1888), which humorously critiques the institution of marriage; to “A Winter Courtship” (1890), which portrays the social expectations of an older couple planning their marriage; to “The Flight of Betsey Lane” (1893), which explores the independence from society of a character unconcerned with class or money. Also included in those four collections are some of Jewett’s most enduring nonfiction sketches—such as “The White Rose Road” (1890), which assesses the environmental degradation of her native section of Maine—as well as some short stories of primarily historical rather than purely literary interest. Among the latter stories are the 1893 “Decoration Day” (a favorite of Jewett herself but little read in recent years), which depicts a Civil War commemoration ceremony attended by veterans of that war, and “A Native of Winby” (1893), which chronicles a fictional United States senator’s return to visit his hometown and his encounter with a woman he had courted in the past. Other memorable short stories from this phase of Jewett’s career include “The Passing of Sister Barsett” (1893), which concerns a nurse’s disgust at the callousness of relatives who fail to show proper respect to a dying elderly woman; “The Hiltons’ Holiday” (1895), which portrays the aspirations of Maine girls who seek to develop imaginations in a hostile rural environment; and “The Guests of Mrs. Timms” (1895), an exploration of the subtlety of class distinctions among late-nineteenth-century New England women.
By 1896 Jewett had produced a diverse body of work, with her greatest aesthetic achievement having been in the short story; she had emerged as one of the most respected American authors, praised by critics and fellow writers (from John Greenleaf Whittier to Henry James) and passionately appreciated by female readers who valued Jewett’s keen insight into the hearts and minds of women (her fictional characterizations of men were generally less compelling). Jewett’s next work, The Country of the Pointed Firs, revealed that she could sustain an imaginative narrative beyond the necessarily limited scope of the short story form. That novel garnered emphatically positive responses from readers and critics as well as from such fellow authors as Rudyard Kipling, who wrote in a letter to Jewett: “I maintain (and will maintain with outcries if necessary) that that is the realest New England book ever given us” (Blanchard, p. 304).
Interestingly, Jewett herself was less sure regarding the worth of that work, and for some years afterward she insisted that she preferred her earlier novel, A Marsh Island, which today is seldom read. Jewett was exhausted after completing The Country of the Pointed Firs, and three years would pass before the appearance of her next book. The Queen’s Twin, and Other Stories (1899) contains two pieces of short fiction (the title story and “A Dunnet Shepherdess”) set in the fictional town—Dunnet Landing—that was featured in The Country of the Pointed Firs, suggesting that that novel had made a deeper impression in Jewett’s psyche than the author could admit at the time. During this period, Jewett wrote two other Dunnet Landing stories, “The Foreigner” and “William’s Wedding.” “The Queen’s Twin” and “A Dunnet Shepherdess” were originally published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1899; “The Foreigner” (which some Jewett scholars consider as one of her finest short stories) appeared in that same periodical in 1900; while “William’s Wedding” was published there posthumously in 1910. The editors of The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (published by Houghton Mifflin in 1925) incorporated all of those Dunnet Landing stories except for “The Foreigner” into the original text of The Country of the Pointed Firs without Jewett’s direction or approval. In the present edition, the four later Dunnet Landing stories are printed in a separate section to reflect the fact that Jewett in all likelihood intended those stories to stand apart from the original text of The Country of the Pointed Firs as individualized narrative statements.
The final major volume of Jewett’s work published during her lifetime, The Tory Lover, appeared in 1901, though that historical novel had been previously serialized in the Atlantic Monthly. Set in both England and Maine during the Revolutionary War, The Tory Lover depicts the plights of protagonists—English settlers in the New World—whose loyalties shift from supporting the king to sympathizing with the colonialist cause. While judged by several of Jewett’s literary friends, including Henry James, as being of less value as imaginative literature than The Country of the Pointed Firs, The Tory Lover was personally significant to Jewett because in writing it the author psychologically wove together many strands of her ancestral and regional identities. Shortly after the novel’s publication, Jewett conveyed in a letter: “I cannot believe that so much of my heart was put into it without some life staying there—I could not have died until I got it done!” (Blanchard, p. 348). While The Tory Lover was neither a critical success nor a popular best-seller, the year 1901 nonetheless brought Jewett a measure of professional recognition when she received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Maine’s Bowdoin College, which was the first such degree ever bestowed upon a woman by an all-male academic institution in the United States.
On the day she turned fifty-three years of age, September 3, 1902, while on a horse-drawn carriage ride with her sister and a friend, Jewett was injured after the horse fell, hurling the author onto the ground. Jewett’s wounds
(including neck injuries and a concussion) were serious, and she never fully recovered. Certainly, her productivity as an author diminished after the accident. During the remaining years of her life, Jewett would produce just one more book, An Empty Purse (1905), which contained a single short story. Over the next several years, her health remained precarious—she suffered from chronic physical discomfort caused by rheumatism as well as by emotional factors (specifically, Annie Fields’s 1902 stroke and the 1904 death of Jewett’s friend Sarah Whitman). While Jewett did not write much fiction during this period, by 1907 she had regained some of her strength, though her primary commitment to writing involved sending letters to friends and acquaintances (many of these documents were collected in a 1911 volume of Jewett’s letters edited by Annie Fields). One of Jewett’s newest correspondents was the younger author Willa Cather, whom Jewett befriended during the final year of her life (after Jewett’s death, Cather would publicly credit Jewett for her mentorship and would continue to promote Jewett’s work). In March 1909, while visiting Annie Fields in Boston, Jewett suffered a stroke. Moved back the next month by train to South Berwick, she died on June 24, 1909, in her home.
Sarah Orne Jewett’s most enduring contributions to the canon of American literature were The Country of the Pointed Firs and a dozen or so short stories—most if not all of which, arguably, are included in this Barnes & Noble Classics edition. Needless to say, the author’s standing among literary critics has grown steadily through the years. Only a few pieces of criticism on Jewett’s literary output appeared during her lifetime—notably, two essays published in the Atlantic Monthly: “Miss Jewett” (1894), by Horace E. Scudder, and “The Art of Miss Jewett” (1904), by Charles Miner Thompson. A revelatory source of information on Jewett’s life and literary career published before the author’s death was her own 1892 essay “Looking Back on Girlhood,” which originally appeared in the nationally popular magazine Youth’s Companion. In a 1903 edition of the British literary magazine Academy and Literature, critic Edward Garnett wrote prophetically regarding the value of The Country of the Pointed Firs and regarding the inevitable embrace of that book by future generations: “So delicate is the artistic lesson of this little masterpiece that it will probably be left for generations of readers less hurried than ours to assimilate” (Cary, Appreciation of Sarah Orne Jewett, p. 25).
After Jewett’s death, critics and scholars began the process of assessing the author’s overall literary achievement. An August 1909 piece in the Atlantic Monthly by M. A. De Wolfe Howe featured an appreciation of Jewett and her work. In a 1913 essay in the Yale Review, Edward M. Chapman critically evaluated Jewett’s entire oeu vre. Likely the most influential appraisal of Jewett was from Willa Cather, who, in her preface to the aforementioned 1925 selected edition of Jewett’s fiction, stated that The Country of the Pointed Firs was one of the few true classics of American literature. As Cather proposed in that preface:
If I were asked to name three American books which have the possibility of a long, long life, I would say at once, The Scarlet Letter, Huckleberry Finn, and The Country of the Pointed Firs. I can think of no others that confront time and change so serenely. The latter book seems to me fairly to shine with the reflection of its long, joyous future. It is so tightly yet so lightly built, so little encumbered with heavy materialism that deteriorates and grows old-fashioned. I like to think with what pleasure, with what a sense of rich discovery, the young student of American literature in far distant years to come will take up this book and say, “A masterpiece!” as proudly as if he himself had made it (Cather, p. xviii).
That 1925 edition attracted many new readers to Jewett’s fiction, and interest in the author’s work continued to grow among scholars. Francis Otto Matthiessen, in a 1929 biography of Jewett, wrote: “She has withstood the onslaught of time, and is secure within her limits” (Sarah Orne Jewett, p. 145). In a 1940 study of New England literature, Van Wyck Brooks stated that he believed Jewett was one of the finest fiction writers in the history of that region: “No one since Hawthorne had pictured this New England world with such exquisite freshness of feeling” (New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1915, p. 353). Carlos Baker, in a 1948 survey of American literary history, asserted that Jewett had “the most distinguished career among all the writers of regional fiction. [She] developed her gifts more rapidly, maintained them at a higher level, and employed them with greater dexterity and control than did any of her predecessors in the field” (quoted in Spiller, Literary History of the United States, p. 845). According to the 1955 textbook American Heritage: An Anthology and Interpretive Survey of Our Literature: “It was Miss Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs which brought the local color novel to its highest degree of artistic perfection in nineteenth century America” (Howard et al., p. 316).
All those comments, however positive they seemed in their overtones, inadvertently limited Jewett’s literary reputation. By suggesting that The Country of the Pointed Firs and Jewett’s various short stories were primarily successful within the boundaries of the generally dis respected literary genre of local color writing and within New England regional literature, those scholars underestimated the impact of Jewett’s achievement. In a more balanced, contemporary perspective on the author’s work, biographer Paula Blanchard criticized Jewett for her lack of objectivity about her own work (which Blanchard thought had weakened many of Jewett’s writings); similarly, Blanchard chastised the author for catering to “the modest expectations of the periodical reader” (Blanchard, p. 337). Nonetheless, the biographer praised Jewett’s best work as being increasingly relevant today, since “thematically Jewett’s stories form a coherent whole, expressing concerns about spiritual alienation, social fragmentation, commercial exploitation, and the failure of the national memory” (Blanchard, pp. 337-338).
Jewett has significantly influenced the literary efforts of numerous authors. Kate Chopin, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, and Mary Noailles Murfree all cited Jewett’s fictional works—especially “A White Heron” and The Country of the Pointed Firs—as excellent models of imaginative regional writing that had inspired them at some stage in their careers. Willa Cather dedicated her 1913 novel O Pioneers! to Jewett, stating in her dedication that “I tried to tell the story of the people [in O Pioneers!] as truthfully and simply as if I were telling it to her [ Jewett] by word of mouth.” Jewett’s works were distinguishable by her distinctive literary style, created, according to Cather, out of a “very personal quality of perception, a vivid and intensely personal experience of life” (Donovan, p. 137). Interestingly, Jewett’s unique perception—a transcendent, minimal ist vision—was originally fostered by her father, who not only encouraged his daughter to write but also provided advice as to how she might do so more effectively. As Jewett wrote in an 1871 diary entry: “Father said this one day[:] ‘A story should be managed so that it should suggest interesting things to the reader instead of the author’s doing all the thinking for him, and setting it before him in black and white. The best compliment is for the reader to say “Why didn’t he put in this or that[?]” ’ ” (Donovan, p. 4; Jewett’s italics). In addition to suggesting that his daughter write in an understated way, Dr. Jewett encouraged the aspiring author to interpret the world realistically rather than sentimentally. Elsewhere in her diary, Jewett wrote: “My dear father used to say to me very often, ‘Tell things just as they are! ’ ” (Donovan, p. 5; Jewett’s italics).
Some recent critics have suggested that Jewett did not heed her father’s latter point. In The Country of the Pointed Firs and in some short stories, these critics believe, Jewett indulged in nostalgia. According to critic Susan Allen Toth, “Most writers on Jewett agree that the world of Dunnet Landing, recorded in The Country of the Pointed Firs, is one of nostalgic charm, quiet appeal, warmth, and community. Yet it is also a decaying world, since its guardians are all old[,] and no generation waits to take their place” (Regionalism and the Female Imagination: A Collection of Essays, p. 25). Yet, the nostal
gic representation of a well-ordered rural culture in an American region is precisely part of the appeal of Jewett’s work to American readers in urban, modern times. Indeed, The Country of the Pointed Firs explored a world that exhibited little of the vitality rampant in the United States during the post-Civil War prosperity.
It might be said that Jewett loved the past (though her vision of history was often romanticized) and feared the future (Jewett was well aware that Maine was becoming economically and politically marginal compared to more prosperous states). Jewett’s conservatism was perhaps partly a result of her psychological desire to maintain her social standing in a largely rural region. The plight of the unnamed narrator in The Country of the Pointed Firs echoed Jewett’s own insider/outsider status in South Berwick. That narrator, a writer like Jewett, was visiting the fictional village of Dunnet Landing in the hope of finding the peace of mind to write and to be spiritually transformed in a cultural environment unencumbered by divisive, class-based snobbery. Both Jewett and her alter ego sought escape from the strictures of Victorian society by consciously seeking acceptance within a traditional rural culture. These two women—the creator and her fictional personae—form bonds of friendship with other females in order to better express their natural selves within a natural rather than manmade environment; this was an act of rebellion that permitted the women to escape from the social straitjacket constructed for them by the Victorian male hierarchy.