Critics have yet to discuss adequately Sarah Orne Jewett’s Christianity as a source for her fiction. Jewett is best known for The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), a series of sketches set in southern coastal Maine, but it is in a little-known tale, “A Dunnet Shepherdess,” that she explicitly reveals her characters’ biblical convictions, which are inspired by her own Congregational heritage. Through a shepherdess’s experience, Jewett indicates that her Dunnet Landing community is knit together by the biblical concern for practices of the earth.
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Judd, Richard, Sheila McDonald, and James Vickery. “Maine Agriculture, 1783–1861.” Maine: the Pine Tree State from Prehistory to the Present. Ed. Richard W. Judd, Edwin A. Churchill, and Joel W. Eastman. Orono, MN: U of Maine P, 1995. 242–61. Print.
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More, Hannah. “The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain.” New Haven, CT: Walter, Austin, & Co., 1810. America’s Historical Imprints. Web.
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Noll, Mark A. “Jonathan Edwards and Nineteenth Century Theology.” Jonathan Edwards and the American Experience. Ed. Nathan Hatch and Harry Stout. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. 260–87. Print.
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PrattAnnis (1972) Women and Nature in Modern Fiction.. Contemporary Literature13.4(1972): 476–90. Print.
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Richardson, Kelly L. ‘“A Happy, Rural Seat of Various Views’: The Ecological Spirit in Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs and the Dunnet Landing Stories.” Such News of the Land: U.S. Women Nature Writers. Ed. Thomas S. Edwards and Elizabeth A. De Wolfe. Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 2001. 95–109. Print.
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