The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett, Volume I

The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett, Volume I

The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett, Volume I opens with "The Country of the Pointed Firs," narrated by an unnamed woman who returns to the Maine coast village of Dunnet Landing for a summer of writing and lodges with the herbalist widow Mrs. Almira Todd. Mrs. Todd tends a garden of medicinal herbs, brews spruce beer, and dispenses remedies to neighbors, at first employing the narrator as her helper before the narrator withdraws to devote her days to writing in a rented, disused schoolhouse on the hill. One evening Mrs. Todd confides that she once loved a man above her station whom she could not marry. The narrator meets the elderly, frail Captain Littlepage, who tells her a strange tale from his shipwreck days near Hudson's Bay: a crewman named Gaffett described a spectral, fog-bound town glimpsed by shipwrecked sailors in the far north, inhabited by silent, insubstantial gray shapes that seemed to be a "waiting place between this world an' the next." The narrator and Mrs. Todd sail out to Green Island to visit Mrs. Todd's mother, the spry eighty-six-year-old Mrs. Blackett, and her shy brother William, a fisherman. They share a chowder dinner, and Mrs. Todd revisits a hilltop pennyroyal patch tied to memories of her drowned husband Nathan, admitting she never loved him as deeply as an earlier, unnamed love. Later, Mrs. Todd's old friend Mrs. Fosdick visits, and the two women reminisce, eventually telling the narrator the story of Joanna Todd, Mrs. Todd's husband's cousin, who was jilted before her wedding and exiled herself as a hermit on remote Shell-heap Island, refusing all human company until her death, sustained only by occasional gifts left by sympathetic neighbors and by a visit from Mrs. Todd and a well-meaning but clumsy minister. The narrator later sails out with Captain Bowden to see Shell-heap Island and Joanna's grave for herself. Mrs. Todd, her mother, and the narrator then travel by wagon to the great Bowden family reunion, a joyous, ceremonial gathering of a large extended clan at the old Bowden farmhouse, complete with a marshaled procession led by the eccentric, soldierly Santin Bowden, a bountiful outdoor feast (including a gingerbread model of the ancestral house), speeches, and a poetess's verses. On the way home the narrator reflects on the deep, lifelong bonds among these scattered coastal families. Afterward the narrator becomes acquainted with old fisherman Elijah Tilley, one of a close-knit group of aging Dunnet Landing seamen. He invites her to his tidy, sorrowfully maintained house, shows her his late wife's best room and china, and speaks at length of his enduring grief and devotion to her memory. In the final chapters, the narrator is unexpectedly drawn into William Blackett's secretive annual trout-fishing expedition: Mrs. Todd anoints him with a pungent pennyroyal lotion against mosquitoes before he sets off, and he later returns in his wagon to invite the narrator along, dressed in his father's old foreign-cut linen clothes. They drive up country, leave the wagon at a farmhouse, and set out on foot into the pasture toward a spruce-shaded trout brook, preparing their lines together as the narrator settles in to enjoy the day's fishing with William.

By Sarah Orne Jewett · First published 1899 · Genre: Regional Fiction, Short Story Collection, Literary Realism · 24 chapters · 72,658 words

First lines

There was something about the coast town of Dunnet which made it seem more attractive than other maritime villages of eastern Maine. Perhaps it was the simple fact of acquaintance with that neighborhood which made it so attaching, and gave such interest to the rocky shore and dark woods, and the few houses which seemed to be securely wedged and tree-nailed in among the ledges by the Landing. These houses made the most of their seaward view, and there was a gayety and determined floweriness in their bits of garden ground; the small-paned high windows in the peaks of their steep gables were like knowing eyes that watched the harbor and the far sea-line beyond, or looked northward all along the shore and its background of spruces and balsam firs. 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.

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Maine · New England · Coastal setting · Rural village · 19th century · Short stories · Regional fiction · Women's lives · Lost love · Grief and mourning · Aging characters · Widows

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