The Country of the Pointed Firs and Selected Short Fiction (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Book

This short novel is narrated by a young woman writer who spends a summer in a small coastal town in Maine. The time period is not stated although it has to be before 1896, which is when the book was published (actually the book was published in 4 monthly installments of the Atlantic Monthly before published in book form), so let's say the late 1800s. The narrator rooms with an older lady, Mrs. Todd, and since school is out, she is allowed to write in the small one-room schoolhouse in the town. She gets along quite well with Mrs. Todd, and they have some nice conversations, and Mrs. Todd occasionally has visitors, such as her mother who lives on a nearby island, and through these connections stories are told via these other people about themselves, and other people that they know. The narrator attends an annual family reunion at another homestead. More stories are told.

This is a gem of a book. The writing is exquisite. There is no plot line'the novel involves a number of stories and reminisces by people as recollected by the young woman writer (from now on referred to as the narrator). The chapters are short, sometimes three pages long. I was interrupted in my reading by particular sentences that resonated with me, so I had to write them down. Stories that I read often brought back personal memories of things that had happened in my life years ago'this novel was able to do that for me.

The characters were not saints. They had their petty concerns. But for the most part they were decent people.

Notes:
This is taken from the introduction (which I read afterwards) by Alison Easton which summarizes the structure of the novel far better than I can describe:
• The sense of recognition and connection is further embodied in the construction of the narrative itself'the frequent use of conversation to tell the stories, the way the stories are folded into other stories, the various voices with their different perspectives, the continual sense of audience and shared discussion, the way the action constantly circles back on itself.

I mentioned this novel was short. It was edited by Alison Easton and she used the original version of the novel when it was first published in 1896. Later editions appended 4 short stories (but they are much longer than the original chapters) to the end of the original novel and so you have to be careful of how you read this novel. Three of the four stories appended to this novel were included in the issue I had (along with 7 other stories) but I did not read all of them. I felt I had no need to'I can read them later if I want. Easton's reasoning was this, and why I would recommend reading the novel by only reading those chapters in the original editions, and digesting what it means to you, and then read the additional three stories if you want, understanding this is not how Jewett meant for her novel to be read: "I feel that the expanded version spoils the integrity of her text, making it increasingly a more conventional novel in form and thus losing the delicate suggestiveness and web-like effects of the sketch structure."

I was intrigued by a synopsis summarizing Sarah Orne Jewett's life. It is stated that she "incurred serious injuries in 1902 after being thrown from a carriage. This prevented any further writing. She died in 1909." I was mystified as to why being thrown from a carriage would end her writing career... When I dug a little bit deeper, I found this:
• Author Sarah Orne Jewett, of South Berwick, Maine, ended her writing career after a carriage accident in 1902. "The horse stepped on a rolling stone and fell, throwing Miss Jewett, who held the reins, and Miss Rebecca Young, her seat companion, over the horse's head. Miss Young escaped with a severe shaking up, but Miss Jewett was considerably injured about the head and spine." She never fully recovered from the accident. (Jim: I found in another link that she had trouble concentrating after the accident.)

Here are a couple of quotes from the book that resonated with me (they are examples among many!):
This is the end of the family reunion:
• "The leave-takings were as affecting as the meetings of these old friends had been. There were enough young persons at the reunion, but it is the old who really value such opportunities; as for the young, it is the habit of every day to meet their comrades, ' the time of separation has not come. To see the joy with which these elder kinfolk and acquaintances had looked in one another's faces, and the lingering touch of their friendly hands; to see these affectionate meetings and then the reluctant partings, gave one a new idea of the isolation in which it was possible to live in that all thinly settled region. They did not expect to see one another again very soon; the steady, hard work on the farms, the difficulty of getting from place to place, especially in winter when boats were laid up, gave double value to any occasion which could bring a large number of families together. Even funerals in this country of the pointed firs were not without their social advantages and satisfactions. I heard the words 'next summer' repeated many times, though summer was still ours and all the leaves were green.

The narrator is leaving Mrs. Todd's house at the end of the summer to go back to the city…:
• "When I went in again the little house had suddenly looked empty as it had the day I came. I and all my belongings had died out of it, and I knew how it would seem when Mrs. Todd came back and found her lodger gone. So we die before our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end.

Reviews (just a sampling):
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• Willa Cather edited The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (1925) for publisher Houghton Mifflin, and in her preface classed The Country of the Pointed Firs with Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter as one of "three American books which have the possibility of a long, long life."