Though not as well-known as the writers she influenced, Sarah Orne Jewett nevertheless remains one of the most important American novelists of the late nineteenth century. Published in 1884, Jewett’s first novel, A Country Doctor, is a luminous portrayal of rural Maine and a semiautobiographical look at her world. In it, Nan’s struggle to choose between marriage and a career as a doctor, between the confining life of a small town and a self-directed one as a professional, mirrors Jewett’s own conflicts as well as eloquently giving voice to the leading women’s issues of her time. Perhaps even more important, Jewett’s perfect details about wild flowers and seaside wharfs, farm women knitting by the fireside and sailors going upriver to meet the moonlight, convey a realism that has seldom been surpassed and stamp her writing with her signature style. A contemporary and friend of Willa Cather, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Julia Ward Howe, Sarah Orne Jewett is widely recognized as a pathfinder in American literary history, courageously pursuing a road less traveled that led the way for other women to follow.
- ISBN10 0553214985
- ISBN13 9780553214987
- Publish Date 6 April 1999 (first published 1 December 1984)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 24 November 2015
- Publish Country US
- Publisher Random House USA Inc
- Imprint Bantam Books Inc
- Format Paperback (US Mass Market)
- Pages 304
- Language English
- URL https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780553214987