Hidden Places: Maine Writers on Coastal Villages, Mill Towns, and the North Country

Abstract

In the prologue to his new book, Hidden Places: Maine Writers on Coastal Villages, Mill Towns, and the North Country, Joseph A. Conforti describes Maine as “New England’s Alaska” (xi). Given Maine’s thousands of miles of fractal coastline and its sparsely-populated interior encompassing 27,000 square miles, much of the state’s literary fiction is set in out-of-the-way communities, some hidden in the sense of “hard to find on a map” and others “hidden” in the sense of requiring careful excavation to reveal their deeper significance. Primarily intended for general readers, but meant to serve academics and teachers as well, Hidden Places is neither a critical study nor a comprehensive encyclopedia of Maine literature but a useful companion to the best of the state’s place-based fiction. Conforti, founding director of the American and New England Studies program at the University of Southern Maine and the author of Imagining New England as well as Creating Portland: History and Place in Northern New England, proves himself a worthy Maine guide. In Hidden Places, he constructs his own canon of Maine regional fiction, consisting of eleven authors. In keeping with his book’s purpose as a general introduction, Conforti offers a capsule biography and an overview of each writer’s literary reputation, as well as lengthy, detailed plot summaries of selected works. His thought-provoking thematic juxtaposition of authors and texts provides critical takeaway for the not-so-general reader. Hidden Places is divided into three parts foregrounding the significance of place. Part I, “Coast and Islands,” includes three chapters on native authors Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Ellen Chase, and Ruth Moore respectively. Conforti’s discussion of Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) and “The Foreigner” (1900) establishes themes that will dominate the book: Maine’s decline and fall from an illustrious and outward-facing historic past, in this case, the