Mind-reading to smooth relations

Colorized phot of Saran Orne Jewett’s house in South Berwick, Maine, taken in 1910.

Lookout Point, in Harpswell Maine.

— Photo by Kyle MacLea

“We were standing where there was a fine view of the harbor and its long stretches of shore all covered by the great army of the pointed firs, darkly cloaked and standing as if they waited to embark. As we looked far seaward among the outer islands, the trees seemed to march seaward still, going steadily over the heights and down to the water's edge.”

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“Tact is after all a kind of mind-reading.’’

— Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) in her novel Country of the Pointed Firs, like much of her work set on the southern coast of Maine

Look homeward

The Sarah Orne Jewett House, in South Berwick, Maine, shortly after her death

“What has made this nation great? Not its heroes but its households.’’

— Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909), an American novelist, short-story writer and poet, best known for her works set along or near the Maine C. She’s considered an important practitioner of American literary regionalism. Her most famous book, The Country of the Pointed Firs, seems to be based on summer stays on the St. George Peninsula, where she got to know a lot of the locals. See red map below.

Ledgy fields

The shore of Mount Desert Island, Maine

“She was the one who lived up country
Half in the woods on a rain-washed road
With a well not near and a barn too far
And the fields ledgy and full of stones
That the crows cawed over and liked to walk in…’’

From “After Reading The Country of the Pointed Firs,’’ by Jean Garrigue (1912-1972)

 The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) was Sarah Orne Jewett’s  (1849-1909) most successful novel. It’s about a woman novelist who travels to Maine to find peace in order to finish a book.’’

Set in the fictional fishing community of Dunnet Landing, based on villages on Mount Desert Island, the novel reads rather like a collection of sketches, Like Jewett, the narrator is a woman, a writer, unattached and genteel. Anxious to protect her writing time, she works in an empty schoolhouse. Still, she also spend a lot of time with her landlady, Mrs. Todd, a herbalist, and the latter’s family and friends.