The sadness and beauty of Jewett's Pointed First and other summer-island books

Today Sarah Orne Jewett's "novel" The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) would probably be packaged and marketed as a memoir or collection of essays, which says more about our standards of veracity for nonfiction today: Composite characters and any other narrative devices to bring observations and reporting on the actual into the realm of the marketable are all OK. But in her time, the only way to fairly represent this material is as fiction, even though it has the ring of veracity (w/ made of up names of people and locales). However you classify this work it's, even a century later, quite beautiful and of sociological significance as well, as good a piece of "reporting" on an isolated, highly independent culture, vanishing even then and rare but not unheard of today on the coast of the North Atlantic. She does a beautiful job throughout of bringing these people and their habitations to life, in a way that never seems condescending and is rich w/ detail and highly credible vernacular. It's a portrait of a place, of course, but primarily of the people living on the coast of Maine, and we get a sense of how lonely they are - and especially eager for conversation w/ any outsider who hasn't heard their tales before - yet how strong and self-reliant - tending their gardens, gathering herbs, navigating the challenging waters. The novel closes w/ a grand expedition (land travel then by horse-drawn carriage) to a family reunion a few miles inland, and we sense that these relatives, only a few miles apart from one another, see one another only once a year or so - and also that all gripes and grievances are kept alive forever. Then the narrator - obvious a v of SOJ, a writer come to spend the summer months in this small community (on Boothbay Harbor, apparently) - spends an afternoon w an elderly, widowed fisherman, and we see how lonely he is and how competent and the daily tasks of living on his own, everything from mending clothing to harvesting potatoes and lobsters and keeping his house warm and in order. It's hauntingly sad and truthful, yet this lonely man isn't seeking pity or condolence, just some brief conversation and companionship. The farewell, as the summer ends, is unexpectedly abrupt, w/ the narrator's summer host, Mrs. Todd, with whom she's grown quite close, packs up a lunch for the narrator and barely says good-bye - an instance of the shutting out emotions so as not to disrupt their lives of independence and isolation. These summer-island narratives are part of a small genre that is most at root in Scandinavian literature, see Tove Jansson's Summer Book and of course the great People of Hemso, by Strindberg.