Another book I have long heard of but never read! It did not feel like I was reading fiction, but that I was reading a memoir of a woman’s sojourn on a small Maine island filled with colorful characters from time past.

The narrator rents a room for the summer on Dunnet Landing, Maine, planning on writing. Her host supports herself with herbal remedies, often involving the writer in collecting her herbs and selling the remedies. She visits her elderly mother who lives on an island, and introduces the writer to town society.

The townswomen complain that with the collapse of the whaling industry, young people no longer leave home to see the world. These women had gone to the South Seas with their husbands. “Everybody’s just like everybody else now,” with so few seafaring families left.

Captain Littlepage tells tales of sailing to Hudson’s Bay and seeing Esquimaux, complaining that “…a community narrows and grows dreadful ignorant when it is shut up in its own affairs, and gets no knowledge of the outside world except from a cheap, unprincipled newspaper,” the narrator is told. The Captain can quote Milton and Shakespeare, having spent his time on ship reading.

I often wondered a great deal about the inner life and thought of these self-contained old fishermen; their minds seemed to be fixed upon nature and the elements rather than any contrivances of man, like politics or theology. from Land of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett

We understand that these characters are educated and worldly in their own ways. Knowledge of herbs and herbal remedies. Memorizing great literature. An aged, widowed fisherman shows off the braided rugs his wife had made, while the old man knits in winter.

The descriptions of the land and sea are beautiful. As summer ends, she writes, “There was no autumnal mist on the coast, nor any August fog; instead of these, the sea, the sky, all the long shore line and the inland hills, with every bush of bay and every fir-top, gained a deeper color and a sharper clearness.”

The conversation at the end of the book is very insightful and interesting. Jewett’s book is compared to Jane Austen in showing women’s relationships and community through visits.

In addition, there is included collected short stories.

It was lovely to travel back to the late 19th c and meet these folk.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book through NetGalley. ( )

My edition not here - a lovely hardcover with artful illustrations. I'm sure reading that made all the difference. Reading an old mm pb or gutenberg on the e-reader would not have felt meaningful, or given me the experience of giving Jewett's words & ideas the consideration they deserved.

So, I'm glad. I'm glad I got to know this little fishing village in Maine, of over 100 years ago. What interesting people, talking even then about the way of life they were saying goodbye to. Unfortunately for me there was almost nothing about the fish, or wildlife, not even much about the herbs that Mrs. Todd used in her potions and balms. Hm... come to think of it, it's interesting that she was just another neighbor with a talent, whereas so much stale historical fiction would tend to assume she'd be viewed as a witch.

I don't feel the need to reread or recommend this, but I am giving it to my mother. ( )

This is one of my favorite books of all time. I will always use it as an example of 'right place and right time'. If I'd read this book in my 20s I doubt I would have appreciated it as much as I did in my 40s.

The prose is elegant and it does have one truly beautiful line near the very end of the book that touched me. The description is all very good.

I found this book extremely boring. I could almost tell no difference in my comprehension and enjoyment between when I was falling asleep while reading and when I was wide awake while reading, and I can assure you that this book will make you fall asleep. Not much happens.

There are some very deep messages, if you can sift through the overlong prose, about loneliness, disconnect, communication, gossip, and mourning. These are nice, but the book still feels bloated.

I would not recommend this to anyone. If you have to read it for a class, as I did, prepare for a long haul. ( )

[[Sarah Orne Jewett]] was a late 19th/early 20th century American author that I had not yet read. When I saw that she was from Maine and that this novel was set there, I knew I had to read it during our vacation. I really enjoyed it. There isn't a lot of plot in this slim novel - basically a woman writer goes to Maine for the summer looking for a quiet place to write and instead finds herself enamored of both the setting and the people in the community. The nature writing is beautiful and really captures the beauty of coastal Maine - the fir trees, rocky coasts, and fresh pine and ocean smells. And she captures the lifestyle as well - the reliance on the sea, coastal farming, and close-knit though reserved communities.

I enjoyed this and recommend it to anyone who enjoys American writers from this era. It's slow and filled with conversation in dialect, but I liked it. ( )