Agriculture and biblical tradition in Jewett’s “A Dunnet Shepherdess”

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.