Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this book.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
A writer spends one summer in a small fishing village in Maine, in the house of a widow who gathers herbs and knows everybody. Old sea captains, shy farmers, and sharp old ladies tell her their stories, and the whole village slowly becomes a family to her. The book is quiet, like listening on a porch while the tide comes in. It is about paying attention, and it is beautiful.
Jewett grew up in coastal Maine, the daughter of a country doctor, and rode with him on his rounds listening to patients. That listening became her art. In this book a summer boarder from Boston, a writer like Jewett herself, lodges with Almira Todd, herbalist and unofficial mayor of Dunnet's Landing, and the novel unfolds as a season of visits, stories, and journeys: to Green Island, to a family reunion, to the house of a captain who believes he has seen the waiting place of the dead.
There is almost no plot, deliberately. The events are arrivals and departures, and the subject is a maritime culture in its twilight: the great shipping days over, the young gone west, the old keeping the houses and the stories. Jewett's sentences are so clear they look easy, and her ear for Maine speech has never been matched.
Willa Cather, who edited Jewett's stories, ranked this book with the few American works she thought would last. Read it slowly, in summer if you can. It teaches a reader how much story lives inside ordinary talk when somebody loves the talkers.
A Boston writer spends a summer boarding with Mrs. Todd, an herb gatherer in the little Maine fishing village of Dunnet's Landing, and listens. Sarah Orne Jewett's 1896 book is mostly talk: sea captains, widows, family reunions, and stories carried like the tide. It is the masterpiece of American regional writing, a whole coastal world preserved in the voices of the people who lived in it.
The first chapter
THERE WAS SOMETHING about the coast town of Dunnet which made it seem more attractive than other maritime villages of eastern Maine. Perhaps it was the simple fact of acquaintance with that neighborhood which made it so attaching, and gave such interest to the rocky shore and dark woods, and the few houses which seemed to be securely wedged and tree-nailed in among the ledges by the Landing. These houses made the most of their seaward view, and there was a gayety and determined floweriness in their bits of garden ground; the small-paned high windows in the peaks of their steep gables were like knowing eyes that watched the harbor and the far sea-line beyond, or looked northward all along the shore and its background of spruces and balsam firs. When one really knows a village like this and its surroundings, it is like becoming acquainted with a single person. The process of falling in love at first sight is as final as it is swift in such a case, but the growth of true friendship may be a lifelong affair.
After a first brief visit made two or three summers before in the course of a yachting cruise, a lover of Dunnet Landing returned to find the unchanged shores of the pointed firs, the same quaintness of the village with its elaborate conventionalities; all that mixture of remoteness, and childish certainty of being the centre of civilization of which her affectionate dreams had told. One evening in June, a single passenger landed upon the steamboat wharf. The tide was high, there was a fine crowd of spectators, and the younger portion of the company followed her with subdued excitement up the narrow street of the salt-aired, white-clapboarded little town.
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1896. Author died 1909. Public domain worldwide. Share this book: WhatsApp
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