Not many writers can claim both Henry James and “Nosferatu” (2024) director Robert Eggers among their admirers, but at least one accomplished that feat: Sarah Orne Jewett. In 1915, The Atlantic published a story by James in which he hailed Jewett as the “mistress of an art of fiction all her own.” Over a century later, Eggers told the British Film Institute of Jewett’s influence on his 2019 film “The Lighthouse” — specifically, the regional dialect spoken by the characters.

“She was interviewing sailors and sea captains and farmers and writing her stories in dialect phonetically,” Eggers said of Jewett’s work. “This was gold for us.”

“The Country of the Pointed Firs” by Sarah Orne Jewett. Conversation by Brandy Jensen and Stephanie Hershinow. Smith & Taylor Classics. 2024. $17.95

Her 1896 “The Country of the Pointed Firs,” set in the fictional Maine fishing village of Dunnet Landing, is her best-known work. A new edition from Smith & Taylor Classics adds a quartet of Jewett’s short stories into the mix, along with an extended conversation about the classic by critics Brandy Jensen and Stephanie Hershinow. This new volume raises an important question: What does it mean to read “The Country of the Pointed Firs” in 2025?

First, there’s the matter of Jewett’s evocative use of language. Eggers is spot-on when he lauds her use of dialogue, but there’s an equal precision to be found in the ways Jewett uses words to set a place. Here she is in the opening chapter, giving the reader a sense of the fishing village where the novel is set:

“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.”

Language like this doesn’t just describe a place; it incarnates it. “The Country of the Pointed Firs” is, on the surface, a relatively straightforward story: an unnamed writer comes to a small Maine village where she rents out a schoolhouse for the summer to work on a project. She encounters various townspeople and learns much of their history; occasionally, she travels to the nearby islands and attends social gatherings there, including a family reunion.

The profound sense of place that emerges from Jewett’s prose isn’t the only attraction here. One of the narrator’s earliest conversations in the book is with Captain Littlepage, a retired shipmaster who tells her a story that he’d first heard from another man, Gaffett — one that ventures into the realm of the uncanny. Littlepage describes Gaffett’s discovery of a place “where there was neither living nor dead” and where the only inhabitants were “blowing grey figures.” At this early stage, the reader is already on notice not to expect a work of outright realism; the addition of the story “In Dark New England Days” to this volume is another potent reminder of Jewett’s ability to draw readers into an uncanny, potentially supernatural sphere. It isn’t hard to see a direct line from these writings to, say, Shirley Jackson’s unsettling New England tales or Edmund Wilson’s “Memoirs of Hecate County.”

The conversation between Jensen and Hershinow includes thoughtful observations and literary connections that seem designed to spark discussion. Both writers also tackle the question of how “The Country of the Pointed Firs” speaks to readers almost 130 years after its initial publication. Hershinow makes a convincing argument that Jewett was both ahead of her time and created something that doesn’t neatly fit into any era’s literary expectations:

“There’s so much fragmentary contemporary fiction now that a lot of readers today might be quite used to reading novels that are less plot driven or that have these vignettes, but [Jewett’s] doing something that feels much more epic and far-reaching and satisfying,” Hershinow writes.

Later in their conversation, Jensen speaks of Jewett’s empathy for her characters, observing that “[t]hese are all people to be taken seriously, not just stereotypes.” Jensen and Hershinow point to aspects in “The Country of the Pointed Firs” that stand out, from Jewett’s allusions to classical mythology to the subtle ways in which she subverts traditional perceptions of gender. They make a compelling case for reading, or for many Mainers likely re-reading, Sarah Orne Jewett’s signature work — and this edition serves as an excellent place to begin.

New York City resident Tobias Carroll is the author of four books, most recently the novel “Ex-Members.” He has reviewed books for The New York Times, Bookforum, the Star Tribune and elsewhere.