Sarah Orne Jewett

 

Sarah Orne Jewett

 

(c) Copyright (2021) by Kathleen Spaltro.

All Rights Reserved.

 

A summer visitor to a seaside country town in New England, although she essentially remains an outsider, slowly becomes absorbed into the web of smalltown coastal life.  Her narration loosely strings together sketches of people and places, their unity provided by her own presence and the common locale.  This serves as the framework of the most memorable novels and stories reprinted in the Library of America Sarah Orne Jewett volume:  Deephaven, The Country of the Pointed Firs, and “Dunnet Landing Stories.”

The two novels and the stories all possess the charm of a sepia photograph come suddenly to life.  If the family legend retold by your elders entertains you and an episodic, plotless structure doesn’t bother you, Jewett will give you as much pleasure as she has given me.  As Helen, the narrator of Deephaven, comments, “It is wonderful, the romance and tragedy and adventure which one may find in a quiet old-fashioned country town, though to heartily enjoy the every-day life one must care to study life and character, and must find pleasure in thought and observation of simple things, and have an instinctive, delicious interest in what to other eyes is unflavored dulness.”

Read the best first—The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896); then enjoy its slighter but similar predecessor Deephaven (1877); lastly, savor your reunion with Country of the Pointed Firs characters in “Dunnet Landing Stories” (late 1890s).   Helen and Kate, the young ladies who visit Deephaven, prefigure the unnamed narrator of the Dunnet Landing novel and stories.  While Helen and Kate befriend Mrs. Kew, who lives with her husband in the Deephaven lighthouse, the older writer who visits Dunnet Landing befriends her landlady, Mrs. Todd,  the town herbalist who works closely with its country doctor. 

At least as interesting as the portrayals of the local characters are the depictions of Mrs. Todd’s herbs and the medicinal use she makes of them in doctoring the townsfolk.  She tells stories, too, of dead but not forgotten friends, like “poor Joanna,” jilted a month before her wedding day and impelled by melancholy to seclude herself on thirty-acre Shell-heap Island until she died.  Mrs. Todd also tells her lodger about “The Queen’s Twin,” a local woman born in the  same hour as Queen Victoria and about “The Foreigner,” a Frenchwoman married to a local captain and marooned by his death in the misery of local hostility and incomprehension—a pathetic and deeply moving tale.