“The Other One”: An Unpublished Chapter of Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs

Abstract

Firs (1896) has long been central to literary critical debates about the nature and character of American literary regionalism. In the early 1990s, some New Historicist critics aligned the emergence of the literary movement with the rise of tourism as two means by which urban elites defi ned themselves as a socially and racially privileged class in the postwar nation. In an infl uential analysis of the mutually reinforcing development of the literary marketplace and class and cultural hierarchies, Richard Brodhead describes regionalism in Cultures of Letters (1993) as evidencing "an elite need for the primitive made available as a leisure outlet." 1 In giving "exercise to a sophisticate-vacationer's habits of mind," Brodhead writes, regional fi ction "rehearsed a habit of mental acquisitiveness strongly allied with genteel reading." 2 With a privileged urban vacationer as its narrator, Firs "builds the class logic of vacationing" into its very structure, Brodhead claims, pointing to the way that the unnamed narrator, who is also a publishing author, can arrive in the fi ctional community of Dunnet Landing, Maine, and "command someone else's home as a second home for her leisure. .. with a confi dent exercise of her rights." 3 Then, over the course of a summer, she turns the intimate life stories of the residents into her own "sympathetic possessions" that she abstracts and exports out of the place. 4 Feminist critics,

What Was Boston Marriage? Sarah Orne Jewett and Biography

“…My previous contribution to J19, a 2014 coauthored essay introducing an edition of an alternate ending of Sarah Orne Jewett's Country of the Pointed Firs, took up these questions about composition and textual evolution. 2 Jewett also mentored Cather as a fiction writer, and I argue in my book that her partnership with Annie Adams Fields served as a model at the beginning of Cather's relationship with Edith Lewis. I thus took the invitation to participate in this forum as an opportunity to review the five or so years of criticism on Jewett published since my J19 article (excluding my own) and to reflect on how biography has informed this work.…”