Audiobook · read by volunteers
Country of the Pointed Firs
Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909)
Read by Betsie Bush, Kara Shallenberg (1969-2023), James Smith, Frank, Stephan Gambke, Chip, Michael Shook, Patricia Oakley, Marian Brown · 20 chapters · 4 h 25
About the book
A summer visitor arrives in a quiet fishing village on the coast of Maine, rents a room, and sets out to write. She expects solitude and instead finds Mrs. Todd, the village herbalist, whose cottage garden and kindly shrewdness draw her into the life of the place. Over the weeks that follow she meets Mrs. Todd's elderly mother on a nearby island, a retired captain with tall tales, a family reunion, and a procession of neighbours whose small lives turn out to hold great depth. There is little plot in the usual sense. Sarah Orne Jewett writes in sketches, patiently and with exact observation, and the result is a portrait of a community and of a way of life already slipping away. Twenty chapters, about four and a half hours, and nine readers. It is peaceful and quietly moving.
Introduction
Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) grew up in South Berwick, Maine, and became one of the leading American regionalist writers, known for her careful portrayal of New England life. The book is set in the fictional village of Dunnet Landing and told by a visitor who spends a summer there. The Country of the Pointed Firs, published in 1896, is considered her finest work. Henry James called it her “beautiful little quantum of achievement”, a phrase that points to the book's modest scale. Its chapters are short and self-contained, so it can be savoured slowly, a little at a time, like a walk along a shoreline in the evening.
Because it is loosely structured, many critics view it not as a novel but as a series of sketches. Others argue that its structure is unified by both setting and theme. Jewett herself felt that her strengths as a writer lay not in plot development or dramatic tension, but in character development. She determined early in her career to preserve a disappearing way of life, and the book can be read as a study of the effects of isolation and hardship on the inhabitants of the decaying fishing villages along the Maine coast. Readers have long admired the book for its clarity, its humour and its sympathy, and for its picture of a community in which women hold much of the wisdom and the authority.
The recording has 20 chapters, from The Return to The Backward View, and runs for about four and a half hours. Nine LibriVox volunteers share the reading.
Today it appeals to anyone who enjoys a slow, observant and humane book, a quiet pleasure with real staying power.
Public domain
Sarah Orne Jewett died in 1909: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text