From reading the description and from the way that the book opens, I had expected The Country of the Pointed Firs to be a sort of American Cranford.  Consequently, I was expecting to love it as much as I did Elizabeth Gaskell’s lovely novella when I read it last year.  To say that I did not is a bit of an understatement: I didn’t dislike the book, I just thought it was ok.  That’s not to say that I thought The Country of the Pointed Firs was a bad book, but it was one that didn’t work for me.  It’s perhaps unfair of me to judge a book based on the merits of another, but the set up is so similar that I can’t help it.  In both books the narrator returns to a small, unremarkable town that holds a place in her heart, and then proceeds to introduce the reader to the town’s residents and all the quirks that come with small town life.  However, there the similarities end.

Although the concept is a lot like that of Cranford, the execution and the mood of the book are very different.  Cranford chronicles the little, but all important, incidents in the lives of the women who live there, whereas The Country of the Pointed Firs is more of a series of character studies: Jewett introduces the reader to characters and more often than not just lets them sit there.  Sometimes there will be an anecdote, occasionally there may be tea, but by and large nothing happens.  This is not in the way that nothing happens in Cranford, where the little, everyday things are made to seem important to the reader because they are important to the characters, infused with Elizabeth Gaskell’s warmth and humour, but in a way that emphasises the slow and sedate pace of life and the reserved nature of its people. Whereas Cranford had a real feel of community to it, The Country of the Pointed Firs portrayed a life that was typified by, if not loneliness, then at least isolation, broken by occasional moments of contact with others.  Most of the characters are widows, widowers, or people who simply never married. Some of them were intriguing (I particularly liked Mrs Todd and the widowed fisherman who sits alone in his cottage knitting) but I find myself failing to remember many of them.

The book starts out so promisingly:

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.

After a first brief visit made two or three summers before in the course of a yachting cruise, a lover of Dunnet Landing returned to find the unchanged shores of the pointed firs, the same quaintness of the village with its elaborate conventionalities; all that mixture of remoteness, and childish certainty of being the centre of civilization of which her affectionate dreams had told.

I expected to be made to feel all these things as the narrator discovered them anew, but I didn’t.  Ultimately, how much any reader enjoys this book will boil down to how much they like the characters in it, because Jewett gives you nothing else to go on.  As for me, I found the book interesting as a reading experience (particularly given my woeful lack of experience of American fiction), but one that was interesting in an intellectual rather than emotional way.  I found myself unmoved.

If anyone would like my copy of this book, please leave me a message in the comments.  It came from BookMooch, so it’s a bit battered and has occasional marginal notes, but I’d like to see it go to a good home as it’s not one I’m likely to read again.

The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories by Sarah Orne Jewett.  Published by Norton, 1981, pp. 296.  Originally published in 1896.

This month’s prompt asks about the author of the classic that you’re reading at the moment.  Because of the various readalongs in which I’m participating at the moment, I actually have three other classics on the go, Middlemarch, Les Miserables and Moby Dick, in addition to the one that I’m going to focus on today.  I’ve chosen this book because the author is much less well-known, at least on this side of the pond, and finding out more about her might help me to understand her work a bit more.

The book that I’m reading right now is The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett.

Sarah Orne Jewett was born in South Berwick, Maine on 3rd September 1849.  She died in the same town aged 59 on 24th June 1909. 

As a child, she developed arthritis and so was often sent for long country walks to try to ease the symptoms.  She also frequently accompanied her father, a country doctor, on his visits to his patients and it is probably from this background that she developed her keen interest in rural domestic  life on the Eastern Seaboard.  She was educated at the local school, but expanded her knowledge through her family’s library and correspondence with other learned figures.

Sarah Orne Jewett never married.  She did have a deep and long lasting friendship with Anne Fields, the wife of the editor of Atlantic Monthly.  After his death, Sarah and Anne lived together, giving rise to the speculation that she may have been a lesbian, but it is equally plausible that the two were merely friends and companions.

Jewett had her first short story published when she was 19 in the Atlantic Monthly magazine.  She didn’t write novels, preferring sketches, short stories and poems, and was at times quite apologetic about her own writing:

It seems to me I can furnish the theatre, and show you the actors, and the scenery, and the audience, but there never is any play!. . . I seem to get very bewildered when I try to make these come in for secondary parts. . .I am certain I could not write one of the usual magazine stories. If the editors will take the sketchy kind and people like to read them, is not it as well to do that and do it successfully as to make hopeless efforts to achieve something in another line which runs much higher?

Her writing was often dismissed as the chatterings of an old maid, because they aren’t driven by plot, and for a long time it wasn’t considered to be worthy of criticism.  However, Willa Cather considered The Country of the Pointed Firs to be one of three American works (along with Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) to be most likely to achieve permanent remembrance.

Jewett’s writing career was brought to an abrupt and untimely end when she and her sister were involved in a carriage accident when their horse stumbled on a loose rock.  Both sisters were thrown from the carriage and, though Jewett’s sister was largely unharmed, Jewett herself suffered from concussion and spinal damage.  Afterwards, she experienced frequent dizzy spells, memory loss, pain and lack of ability to concentrate which lasted until her death seven years later.

Jewett clearly wrote about the life she knew and held dear to her heart.  Her depictions of Dunnet Landing, the fictional Maine town that provides the setting for The Country of the Pointed Firs, is full of local colour, affection and understanding.  It reads almost more like a memoir than a work of fiction, which seems testament to how well Jewett has captured a time and a place and the people who inhabit that in her writing.