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The Country of the Pointed Firs | Introduction

The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) is considered by many critics to be the masterpiece of Sarah Orne Jewett, one of the greatest “local color” writers of the nineteenth century. Jewett wrote stories and novels set in coastal fishing and shipbuilding towns of her native Maine. As in many of Jewett’s stories, The Country of the Pointed Firs addresses themes of nostalgia, memory, and storytelling, as well as community, family, and friendship. Her character sketches of the aging population of seamen and the widows of seamen are inflected with the local Maine dialect, which she captured with accuracy and liveliness. In recent years, Jewett’s works have been praised for their strong, independent, elderly female characters, of which her greatest creation is Mrs. Todd in The Country of the Pointed Firs.

In The Country of the Pointed Firs, the unnamed narrator is a writer from Boston who has rented a room for the summer in the home of Mrs. Todd in the fictional town of Dunnet Landing, Maine. Throughout the summer, the narrator is captivated by the quaint community of Dunnet Landing, populated by the elderly men and women of the declining shipping industry. Most of the people she meets are between the ages of sixty and ninety, and they all have stories to tell about the town, the sea, and the families who inhabit their tiny community.

The Country of the Pointed Firs Summary

Mrs. Todd
The narrator of The Country of the Pointed Firs is a writer from the city who has decided to spend her summer in the small coastal town of Dunnet Landing, Maine. She has rented a room in the home of Mrs. Todd, a woman in her sixties who serves as the local herbalist, offering herbal reme- dies to help heal the physical and emotional ailments of the local community. Mrs. Todd, however, is on friendly terms with the local doctor, as they both understand the importance of each other’s role in the community. Mrs. Todd spends most of her days out gathering various herbs and plants to create the concoctions that she sells from her home.

The narrator has come to Dunnet Landing because she has a long piece of writing to complete by the end of the summer, but she is soon distracted by the goings-on in Mrs. Todd’s house. She is expected to act as store clerk, selling Mrs. Todd’s remedies from her doorstep while Mrs. Todd is out gathering herbs. The narrator soon realizes that she is not getting any writing done because of this activity, and rents out an old abandoned schoolhouse nearby as a place she can go to write.

Captain Littlepage
One day while the narrator is writing at the schoolhouse, Captain Littlepage, an old seaman in his eighties, stops in and proceeds to tell her a long story. He explains that he was retired from the sea sooner than he had wanted because of the wreck of a ship he was commanding. He describes the circumstance of the wreck, which left the few survivors stranded in a remote location near the North Pole. While waiting for a supply ship to carry him home, Captain Littlepage stayed in the cabin of an old Scottish seaman named Gaffett. Captain Littlepage tells the narrator the story told him by Gaffett.

Gaffett told Captain Littlepage of a shipwreck off the Greenland coast that happened many years earlier, and which only he and two other... » Complete The Country of the Pointed Firs Summary