Few debates have raged so stormily in the last three decades of literary studies as those involving the nature of gender. Dr. Morgan a refreshing view of (and, at times, a break from) that storm in its assertion of a pastoral matriarchy as enduring mode in Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs. As will soon be evident, no student, scholar, or lay reader of Jewett could find a clearer textual history than the one Dr. Morgan Provides us with. Events have conspired to remind us of the important and still growing place in American Literature of Sarah Orne Jewett. To her long-known role in the local color movement, we can now bring to bear more precise and focused analysis of the actual economic decline of rural New England and the westward migration of its younger sons and daughters. At the same time, its older people, particularly women, can be seen in sharper dimension against a burgeoning urban capitalism. The development of Women's Studies, in turn, has given us new and better ways of celebrating the moral and emotional qualities of those left behind. Finally, increased awareness and more sophisticated definition of the long established literary convention called pa