The beauty and veracity of Country of the Pointed Firs

It's been many years since I last read Sarah Orne Jewett's 1896 novel, The Country of the Pointed Firs, and, coming back to her work in the fine Library of America edition, I find the novel just as moving and observant as I remembered it. Is it really a novel? Today, with standards of veracity so much lower than in the 19th century, this work would probably be put forward as a collection of short essays, but no matter - it has the sense of real sociological reportage on a community that even in SOJ's time was archaic and (seemingly) on the verge of extinction, and today it's even more so. In essence the work focuses on an unnamed narrator who decides to rent a room in a house on the coast of Maine in order to find some seclusion and to devote herself to a writing project; she doesn't say what the project is to be about, but it's obvious that, like it or not, she finds herself writing about her summer experiences and encounters with the people in this town on the Atlantic. So in the course of this understated novel we meet these people, gossipy, tough as nails, resourceful, and extremely isolated from the news and culture of the world of their time. And the amazing thing is that, though some aspects of life along the Maine coast have changed radically over the past century - the advent of summer tourism, the phenomenal growth of towns like Freeport w/ its shopping malls, the hip culture that's formed around Portland, and of course the access to the Internet in even the most remote of settings - there are elements that are unchanged. I can recall visiting a small village in coastal Nova Scotia at which the few inhabitants were amazed to see visitors, they couldn't get enough of us, new faces, new voices; because we had, amazingly!, a car, they convinced us to drive to a nearby village where they had a reunion w/ friends they hadn't seen, apparently, in many years - these scenes could have played verbatim in SOJ's novel from a century back. One of the highlights of Pointed Firs entails the narrator's visit to a woman who has lived in isolation on a remote island - and anyone who's visited the deserted Little Cranberry, as we have, will know that the story of the hermit woman is precise and accurate: On Little Cranberry, today uninhabited, you can see the ruins of a cottage, an abandoned cemetery, and a long stretch of rocky beach that at one time had been replete w/ lobsters for the picking - precisely the experience SOJ describes. Firs is not a novel packed with action, but it's a rich document full of nuance and pathos and a look at a culture mostly gone but I suspect still enduring in some remote outposts.