A previously out-of-print and overlooked masterpiece by one of America's most acclaimed early novelists, A Marsh Island by Sarah Orne Jewett (The Country of Pointed Firs), originally published in 1885, is revived here with an insightful introduction and annotations by University of Tulsa professor Don James McLaughlin.
On the eve of what is Doris Owen's likely marriage announcement to her longtime suitor, Dan, landscape painter and New Yorker Dick Dale visits their Massachusetts town on the outskirts of the Great Salt Marsh. Doris and Dale develop an unusual connection, begin to question the lives set out for them, and wonder what new ways of being might be made imaginable by the marshlands. Jewett's depictions of the dreamy coastal region of northeastern Massachusetts, true to her reputation as a 19th-century regionalist, are attuned to both the peaceful patterns of local life rhythms and the seemingly impenetrable mysteries of places on the margins of modern urban life.
Although previous critics and publications focused on the novel's love triangle, McLaughlin's text (rightfully) reframes readerly attention on the novel as Dale's artistic and personal coming-of-age and, simultaneously, a meditation on the shifting boundaries of sexuality and queer kinship. McLaughlin's rich and accessible introduction poses Doris and Dale, both on the brink of what comes next, as existing within a liminal time and place. Like the blotting paper that soaks up Dale's illegible ink marks, this space allows them to be "desiring bod[ies]" that absorb impression and experience "cathartic unintelligibility." --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor