品牌：Sarah Orne Jewett
基本信息
·出版社：Penguin Classics
·页码：304 页码
·出版日：1996年
·ISBN：0140434763
·条码：9780140434767
·装帧：平装
·英语：英语
·丛书名：Penguin Classics
内容简介
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The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) is Sarah Orne Jewett's most popular book. In its elegantly constructed sketches, a worldly, anonymous writer spends the summer in a tiny Maine fishing village where she hopes to find peace and solitude. As she gains the acceptance and trust of her hosts, the community's power and complexity are slowly revealed. While its episodes portray the difficulty and loneliness of rural life, they also display its dignity and strength, particularly as expressed in the bonds between women: mothers, daughters, and friends.
This centennial edition contains a facsimile of the original text, thereby restoring the novel to Jewett's own version, which had been considerably altered in other published versions, plus four related stories. Further enhancing the importance of this volume is editor Sarah Way Sherman's introduction, which includes a sketch of Jewett's life and professional development, a commentary on textual accuracy, and a discussion of the book's themes and techiques as well as its historical context.--This text refers to thePaperbackedition.
作者简介
Theodora Sarah Orne Jewett was born on September 3, 1849 to Caroline Frances Perry and Dr. Theodore Herman Jewett. Her father, a physician, was the son of a prosperous merchant in South Berwick, Maine, a shipbuilding and manufacturing town upriver from Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Her childhood was a comfortable one, rich in the cultural and educational activities of a thriving New England town. But Sarah, as she was known, was considered a sickly child, and her father often took her on his rounds to visit patients, bringing her into contact with other rural New Englanders whose experiences and circumstances were quite different from her own. She credited her father's keen eye for natural detail--as well as human nature and its foibles-- her first schooling in the art of observation. With her elder sister, Mary, and her younger sister, Caroline, Sarah attended local schools, finishing at Berwick Academy (1861-66), her father's alma mater.
In her creative writing Jewett began with short stories, first publishing 'Jenny Garrow's Lovers' in 1868 in the periodical The Flag of Our Union under the pseudonym A. C. Eliot. Though pleased by this first publication, Jewett knew she had yet to break into the real literary market. The third story she submitted to The Atlantic Monthly magazine was at last accepted by assistant editor William Dean Howells; it appeared in 1869 under the title 'Mr. Bruce' with the same pseudonym. So began a lifelong association with Howells and his successors as editors of the Atlantic, Thomas Bailey Aldrich and Horace Scudder, relationships that would help Jewett develop as a writer.
In the early 1870s Jewett was freed from financial concerns by a small legacy from her paternal grandfather. She began a peripatetic life, traveling to Cambridge and Boston where she met the literary stars of her era, including John Greenleaf Whittier, Howells, Aldrich, and the book publisher James T. Fields and his wife, Annie, herself a writer and translator. All the while, Jewett was reading works of contemporary European writers such as Gustave Flaubert and George Sand, as well as New England authors like Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Harriet Beecher Stowe--whose Maine novel, Pearl of Orr' Island, Jewett had first read as a young girl and about which she later claimed it gave her 'to see with new eyes and to follow eagerly the old shore where genius pointed the way.'
In September 1873 the Atlantic published 'The Shore House,' the first of a group of stories set in a fictional Maine seaport and the beginning of the collection that was published in April 1877 as her first full length book, Deephaven. A second collection of seven stories, Old Friends and New, was published in 1879, followed in 1881 by Country By-Ways, a book of nine pieces. That same year, upon the death of James T. Fields, Sarah came to visit his widow, Annie, and stayed to spend part of the year at her house on Charles Street in Boston. Thus began the pattern of annual visits in which Sarah would live and travel with Annie in between periods at home in South Berwick. This relationship would become the most important one in Sarah's life.
Over the next decade or so, she published five new collections of stories that contain some of her finest short fiction, especially A White Heron and Other Stories (1886). She also wrote works for children, such as Betty Leicester (1890); two novels, A Country Doctor (1884) and A Marsh Island (1885); and a semiautobiographical book about her father.
Annie and Sarah took four trips to Europe together in 1882, 1892, 1898, and 1900, visiting such luminaries as the Dickens family, Tennyson, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Henry James, and Rudyard Kipling. But their trips throughout New England had the greatest influence upon Jewett's work. During the long summer months, either together with Annie Fields, her sister Mary, or by herself, Jewett visited friends along the coast from Manchester-by-the Sea, out to the Isle of Shoals, down into Maine to Boothbay Harbor, Islesboro, and other parts of Penobscot Bay. These travels not only satisfied her apparent love of good conversation and new experiences but, in at least one instance, actually helped frame her most important work, The Country of the Pointed Firs.,
In July 1895, Jewett spent a long weekend at the summer home of T. B. Aldrich and his wife, Lilian, to see for herself the place Aldrich had described to all his friends as 'magical' and 'unlike anything else he'd known.' His house, called The Crags, was located on the St. George peninsula at the western edge of Penobscot Bay. It was a backwater place not yet fully discovered by tourists or rusticators--the wealthy visitors who descended upon coastal Maine towns for several months each summer. So well did Jewett enjoy her visit that she returned to the area two months later to rent a cottage in the hamlet of Martinsville, where she, Annie Fields, two maids from their Boston household, and later Mary Jewett, settled into the rustic life for a month. In Sarah's letters from this period, written to her sister and to several friends, she describes a lazy summer vacation, including in her descriptions small, clever portraits of local people and local life. Jewett would later tell Henry James that she did 'not exactly [visit] the locality' where she set Pointed Firs before writing the book. She was often cagey about the sources and inspiration for her work. However, the timing of the first installment of the book's publication in the January 1896 issue of the Atlantic lends some proof to more recent assertions that Dunnet Landing was--if not based on Martinsville itself--a creation of Jewett's that had its source in Aldrich's 'omagical' St. George peninsula. Ironically, from the book's publication onward, there has been a general assumption from critics and local St. George inhabitants alike, that the events in Pointed Firs actually happened to Jewett, right down to the rental of a schoolhouse in which it is said she tried to write. Such inaccurate conjectures have not only belied Jewett's artistry but may also have contributed to the postwar, critical dismissal of Pointed Firs as merely another collection of stories in the minor 'local color' genre.
编辑推荐
From Publishers Weekly
Jewett's 1896 novel and selected stories about the fictional town of Dunnett Landing in rural Maine.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to thePaperbackedition.
From AudioFile
A summer's idyll unfolds at Dunnett's Landing on the coast of Maine. This turn-of-the-century classic is read by Cindy Hardin, whose mellifluous tones may seem sentimental to some younger readers. But for those of us old enough to remember reading aloud by the fire, her voice conjures up a mood rich with bittersweet memory. The characters are well-depicted although confusion in the regional accent and mispronunciations occasionally occur. The overall effect, however, is convincing and professional. S.B.S. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine--This text refers to theAudio Cassetteedition.
From500 Great Books by Women; review by Suzanne Leslie Simmons
Sarah Orne Jewett draws the reader intoThe Country of the Pointed Firswith scenic descriptions, honest characters, and conversations written with true dialect and emotion. While you'll find no adventure within these pages, the series of everyday events which are recounted create a warm and enchanting tale of simpler times. The female narrator speaks in the first person, inviting you to see her world through her eyes as she observes life in the New England seaside village where she is spending the summer in the late 1800s. During her stay she develops a friendship with her hostess, as well as her hostess's mother and brother who live on a nearby island, and learns much about the history and dwellers of the town. Each person, including the narrator, seems to find satisfaction in his or her life's course, while never quite believing that neighbor or kin holds the same contentedness. At the reunion of a local family the narrator comments, "More than one face among the Bowdens showed that only opportunity and stimulus were lacking - a narrow set of circumstances had caged a fine character and held it captive." The bonds and love of community and kin are clear and strong, and it is difficult to leave these people at the end of the book, yet the narrator's words offer assurance and a final challenge: "Their counterparts are in every village in the world, thank heaven, and the gift to one's life is only in its discernment."-- For great reviews of books for girls, check outLet's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14.--This text refers to thePaperbackedition.
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