SOURCE: Campbell, Donna M. “‘In Search of Local Color’: Context, Controversy, and The Country of the Pointed Firs.” In Jewett and Her Contemporaries: Reshaping the Canon, edited by Karen L. Kilcap and Thomas S. Edwards, pp. 63-75. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999.

In the following essay, Campbell elucidates critical responses to local color fiction in the late nineteenth century, focusing on the critical response to Sarah Orne Jewett's short story cycle The Country of the Pointed Firs when it was first published in the 1890s.

When The Country of the Pointed Firs appeared in 1896, it received “Jewett's usual favorable reviews” as a piece of local color fiction, the “minor” genre that nonetheless had become popular in the pages of the Century, the Atlantic, and Harper's Monthly.¹ To judge from these literary journals of the day, however, the genre into which Sarah Orne Jewett's masterpiece fit so recognizably was...