Country of the Pointed Firs
- Length
- 4 h 25 min
- Chapters
- 20
- Language
- English
- Genre
- General Fiction
- First published
- 1896
The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) is considered Jewett’s finest work, described by Henry James as her “beautiful little quantum of achievement.” Despite James’s diminutives, the novel remains a classic. Because it is loosely structured, many critics view the book not as a novel, but a series of sketches; however, its structure is unified through 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. Indeed, she determined early in her career to preserve a disappearing way of life, and her novel can be read as a study of the effects of isolation and hardship on the inhabitants who lived in the decaying fishing villages along the Maine coast.
(summary from Gutenberg e-text)
Chapters
From LibriVox, read by volunteers and in the public domain. LibriVox page (opens librivox.org), the text (opens gutenberg.org), all files on the Internet Archive (opens archive.org).