Sarah Orne Jewett – författare

A hundred and thirty years after it was first published, Sarah Orne Jewett’s story of a young medical woman remains an incisive rendering of the dilemmas of gender, society, and self. Nan Prince first becomes interested in medicine as a child, as the ward of the widowed physician Dr. Leslie. In time she becomes his protégée. But when she enters medical college, she realizes that she will have to choose between marriage and her career, between the demands of her society and her obligations to her true self. Inspired by Jewett’s own interests and by her father, A Country Doctor portrays a world very much in flux and Nan, ultimately, as a woman with a new world opening to her.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Part of the Smith & Taylor Classics series, this beautifully bound edition of The Country of the Pointed Firs celebrates one of American literature’s quiet treasures.A nameless writer has come to Dunnet Landing, a small town on the coast of Maine, for the summer in order to finish her manuscript.Compared to the hectic pace of the city she's left behind, she finds herself absorbed in the slow rhythms of her new daily life. Her observations of the residents of Dunnet Landing—their loves, their fights, their occupation with sky and sea and land, their tall tales, and quiet secrets—comprise The Country of the Pointed Firs. It is a novel seemingly made from the very fabric of community. Jewett’s beautiful, delicate descriptions and her wonderfully natural dialogue bring the whole town and its many inhabitants to life.Once described by Henry James as Jewett’s “beautiful little quantum of achievement,” The Country of the Pointed Firs is a stunning testament to the power of place and memory.Featuring a conversational afterword from writer Brandy Jensen and Professor Stephanie Insley Hershinow.

A Marsh Island (1885) by Sarah Orne Jewett is a a gentle yet vivid tale of life in a small New England coastal community. Told through rich, naturalistic detail, the novel follows the intertwined lives of islanders who live in harmony with the rhythms of nature, exploring themes of queerness, friendship, tradition, and the quiet beauty of everyday life. “A warm draft of kindness billows from A Marsh Island... Discerning, tender and pellucid in its beauty, this is the kind of small, perfect novel it is hard to imagine anybody not loving.” —Sam Sacks, WSJ

This edition of The Country of the Pointed Firs makes the American classic available in the form in which it was originally published in 1896. An edition published after the author's death had incorporated three "Dunnett Landing" stories into the novel as additional chapters; these stories appear here in a separate section, along with a fourth story belonging to this group and four more tales. The four Dunnett Landing stories are "A Dunnett Shepherdess," "The Foreigner," "The Queen's Twin," and "William's Wedding"; the four additional tales are "A White Heron," "Miss Tempy's Watchers," "Martha's Lady," and "Aunt Cynthy Dallett." Here in the fictional town of Dunnett's Landing on the coast of Maine, Sarah Orne Jewett introduces people—now mostly women, as many of the town's men have been lost at sea or moved away in this era of whaling's decline—who have lived next to the sea for generations and seem to share its strength, silence and mystery.

The Country of Pointed Firs, Sarah Orne Jewett's masterpiece, established her among the consummate stylists of nineteenth-century American fiction. Composed in a series of beautiful web-like sketches, the novel is narrated by a young woman writer who leaves the city to work one summer in the Maine seaport of Dunnet Landing, and stays with the herbalist Mrs Almira Todd. She writes a New England idyll rooted in friendship, particularly female friendship, weaving stories and conversations, imagery of sea, sky and earth, the tang of salt air and aromatic herbs into an organic 'fiction of community' in which themes and form are exquisitely matched. To quote Willa Cather: 'The 'Pointed Fir' sketches are living things caught in the open, with light and freedom and air spaces about them. They melt into the land and the life of the land until they are not stories at all, but life itself'. This edition, introduced by Alison Easton, also includes ten of Sarah Orne Jewett's short stories, among them 'The Queen's Twin', 'The Foreigner' and 'William's Wedding' set in Dunnet Landing.

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksA young writer leaves the city to complete her manuscript in a small coastal town, but finds herself writing about the lives of its inhabitants instead – their occupation with memory and tradition, their vibrant female friendships, and the idyll of the landscape that informs their sense of togetherness. A classic of American fiction adored by Willa Cather and Henry James, The Country of the Pointed Firs seems woven from the fabric of community itself.