by the general community. After this, there are moments when the narrator begins to display a keen insight into the residents, especially when she befriends Elijah Tilley, an old fisherman lonely and widowed, who she had previously found taciturn and forbidding. Invited to his house one afternoon, she learns about his dearly loved dead wife, and as Elijah shows her around the house, the narrator feels she understands the story of their lives together and the depth of the dead woman's decency and character. At the end of the summer, the narrator must depart, fearing she will find Boston a harsh, bitter place after her sojourn in Dunnet. Mrs. Todd is too moved to say a proper goodbye to her, and after saying a solitary, tender farewell to the schoolhouse and the town itself, the narrator boards the steamboat which will take her away. From its stern she looks back at Dunnet until the entire town disappears from view. Publication and response The Country of the Pointed Firs was serialized in the January, March, July, and September 1896 issues of The Atlantic Monthly. Sarah Orne Jewett subsequently expanded and revised the text and added titles for the chapters. The novel was then published in book form in Boston and New York by Houghton, Mifflin and Company in November 1896. Henry James described it as her "beautiful little quantum of achievement." Ursula K. Le Guin praises its "quietly powerful rhythms." Because it is loosely structured, many critics view the book not as a novel, but a series of sketches; however, its structure is unified through both setting and theme. The novel can be read as a study of the effects of isolation and hardship experienced by the inhabitants of the decaying fishing villages along the Maine coast. Jewett, who wrote the book when she was 47, was largely responsible for popularizing the regionalism genre with her sketches of the fictional Maine fishing village of Dunnet Landing. Like Jewett, the narrator is a woman, a writer, unattached, genteel in demeanor, intermittently feisty and zealously protective of her time to write. The narrator removes herself from her landlady's company and writes in an empty schoolhouse, but she also continues to spend a great deal of time with Mrs. Todd, befriending her hostess and her hostess's family and friends. References External links Further reading Country Country Country Country 1896 American novels