For one, they illustrate the changes from Romanticism to Realism. As is mentioned above, the obvious, grand symbol present in the Romantic texts is muted in The Country of the Pointed Firs, as it is in most books of Jewett's time. And the intrusive, judgmental narrator in The Scarlet Letter and common in Romantic novels, is altered in Jewett's more realist text. There is a narrator inside of her book, one who acts more as a journalist than a moralizer. Finally, Jewett puts her distinctly feminist twist on any material that might come from Hawthorne.
Men are conspicuously absent from Country.
Jewett's feminine spin also extends to her narrative technique. She rejects the male linear narrative, and in so doing, gives us a more fragmented and circular, web-like narrative structure, which is both feminine and a precursor to modernism. Works Cited Bertoff, Warner. Her World and Her Work. Sarah Orne Jewett.