In summer of 1895, Sarah Orne Jewett made two trips to Maine. The first was to visit her editor, Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Later that summer she returned with her friend Annie Fields.
Renting a cottage on a rocky inlet, Jewett and Fields spent a month in Tenants Harbor, where she met many local people, on whom she likely based several characters in the stories and sketches that would be published in four installments in The Atlantic Monthly. Later in 1896 Houghton Mifflin published the collection as The Country of the Pointed Firs, a complete novel that is one of the masterpieces of the American realism school. Some early reviewers felt that this volume was so lifelike that it was a travel guide. It was, however, fiction.
Rather than simply a collection of travel sketches, the book was recognized and has become one of the great, late nineteenth century novels in American realism. We will examine both the novel and some of her correspondence, giving descriptions of her month in Tenants Harbor that will allow us explore aspects of her novel often overlooked by contemporary and modern reviewers.