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Sarah Orne Jewett was born in Maine on September 3, 1849, and grew up in the small town of South Berwick where she was to spend the principal part of her life. Ill health prevented her from fulfilling her ambition to become a doctor; she turned to writing instead. Her first story was published when she was 18, and her literary production continued unabated until a crippling carriage accident in 1902 ended her creative career. She died on June 24, 1909, leaving behind a remarkable literary legacy. WILLA CATHERwas probably born in Virginia in 1873, although her parents did not register the date, and it is probably incorrectly given on her tombstone. Because she is so famous for her Nebraska novels, many people assume she was born there, but Willa Cather was about nine years old when her family moved to a small Nebraska frontier town called Red Cloud that was populated by immigrant Swedes, Bohemians, Germans, Poles, Czechs, and Russians. The oldest of seven children, she was educated at home, studied Latin with aneighbor, and read the English classics in the evening. By the time she went to the University of Nebraska in 1891-where she began by wearing boy's clothes and cut her hair close to her head-she had decided to be a writer.After graduation she worked for a Lincoln, Nebraska, newspaper, then moved to Pittsburgh and finally to New York City. There she joinedMcClure'smagazine, a popular muckraking periodical that encouraged the writing of new young authors. After meeting the author Sarah Orne Jewett, she decided to quit journalism and devote herself full time to fiction. Her first novel, Alexander's Bridge, appeared in serial form inMcClure' sin 1912. But her place in American literature was established with her first Nebraska novel,O Pioneers!,published in 1913, which was followed by her most famous pioneer novel,My Antonia,in 1918. In 1922 she won the Pulitzer Prize for one of her lesser-known books,One of Ours. Death Comes for the Archbishop(1927), her masterpiece, andShadows on the Rock(1931) also celebrated the pioneer spirit, but in the Southwest and French Canada. Her other novels includeThe Song of the Lark(1915),The Professor' s House(1925),My Mortal Enemy(1926), andLucy Gayheart(1935). She died in 1947.
A wonderful book! But too little known - always a rare personal discovery, published in 1896 and occasionally re-issued, The Country of the Pointed Firs has always been hard to track down, in England certainly. This timely re-printing gives new readers the luck of discovering what various fellow writers (Kipling, Willa Cather, Henry James among them) have rated a masterpiece. 'One evening in June a single passenger landed upon the steamboat wharf.' The narrator, a writer, has come to Dunnet, a village on the coast of Maine, for working quiet. At once we too are caught by the scene itself - the bright sun, the sparkling air, the sweet smell of herbs and grasses, but also the dark woods (those pointed firs!) the cliffs, the rocky shore, the abiding sound of wind and sea. Something of that contrast is in the people themselves, mostly solitaries - widows of seamen, seamen widowers, who live in the small white scattered cottages. A peaceful unwordly haven? Yes, but it holds strange personal tales, partly caught in haunting or teasing fragments. And the nameless visitor - listener, observer, sometimes companion on some zestful expedition - is the medium through which secrets and memories rise to the narrative surface. Thus, the book's impressive central figure Mrs Almira Todd (with whom the writer lodges), herb-gatherer and herbal healer, spirit of goodness, still feels sharp pangs, not only for her drowned young husband Nathan but for the real love of her life, prevented from marrying by his parents. 'My heart was gone out of my keeping before I ever saw Nathan, though he loved me well and made me real happy'. It was, in the narrator's words, 'an absolute archaic grief. She might have been Antigone alone on the Theban plain.' Perhaps the most memorable story comes from Captain Littlepage, a man of worn and troubled refinement, with a tale of Coleridgean awe. Wrecked in the Arctic he was given rough shelter by an old seaman, Guffett, lone survivor of a polar voyage. 'There is a strange sort of country,' Guffett told him, 'way up north beyond the ice, and strange folk living in it... Shapes of folks, all blowing grey figures.' He described how he and a fellow sailor followed one of the 'fog-shaped men... going along slow among the rocks. But Lord! he fluttered away out o' sight like a leaf the wind takes with it, or a piece of cobweb. They would make as if they talked together, but there was no sound of voices. Say what you like, 'twas a kind of waiting place between this world and the next.' Sorrow and wonder, yes. But the prevailing note of the book is one of exhilaration; each day has its bright unexpected events, and the whole, in which so much is learnt, seems part of a quest. When you end, you re-read. As a bonus, you will also find in this edition a restored lost chapter, several short stories, and the effective black-and-white pictures of an early edition. It's a treasure - not to be missed. (Kirkus UK)
