Short Fiction of Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman

This extraordinary volume brings together the works of two important American writers. Both Jewett and Freeman used as their settings the small towns of 19th-century New England, both created as their principal characters mature and elderly women. Their artistic domain encompassed the quiet but sharply etched dramas of everyday existence and individual struggles for survival and fulfillment.Sarah Orne Jewett is represented on these pages by the novel and four stories about the fictional town of Dunnet Landing that make up her classic, The Country of the Pointed Firs, plus five other tales that give added appreciation of the richness of her sympathy for and understanding of the drama of outwardly placid lives. The unique genius of Mary Wilkins Freeman can be experienced in fourteen stories that take us into the intimate world of women fighting for dignity and independence in a society that seeks to fit them into crippling molds -- and among men who are often thoughtless oppressors.Taken together, the stories of Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman offer the modern reader entry into a lost American past and insight into human dilemmas still pertinent today.Edited and with an introduction by Barbara H. Solomon.