Fiction & Fact in S.O. Jewett’s "Country of the Pointed Firs" (1896) (In-person)

Fiction & Fact in S.O. Jewett’s "Country of the Pointed Firs" (1896) (In-person)

Spring (14 hrs or more) | Registration closed 4/11/2024

One Court Street Lebanon, NH 03766 United States

Room 2B

4/15/2024-6/10/2024

View Schedule

$90.00

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.


  • Required Book:

    The Country of the Pointed Firs - Sarah Orne Jewett (ISBN-13: 978-0451531445)


Sarah L. Welsch received her Bachelor’s degree from Smith College and her Masters from Northwestern University where she studied 19th century American Literature. She has made many visits to Tenants Harbor, Maine, and visited archives in Boston and Maine for her research on Sarah Orne Jewett. Before she retired in 2014, she spent four decades in book publishing, including Dartmouth’s UPNE and Northwestern University Press. She lives in Lebanon, NH.