Old Friends and New

A summer visitor brings new life to the quiet Longfield home of Miss Horatia Dane, an older woman whose neighbours believe she once lost a lover at sea. Her young cousin Nelly grows fond of her reserved hostess and begins asking the household servant about the story that Miss Dane herself never tells. Sarah Orne Jewett opens this collection of seven short stories with the gap between a village's shared account and a person's private feelings.

Elsewhere, a letter recounts an awkward dinner at which Mr. Bruce admits that he has mistaken a young guest for a former servant. His embarrassment gives the scene its comedy while exposing his assumptions about social standing. Old Friends and New offers nineteenth-century New England fiction attentive to household routines, family ties and the judgments people make about one another. The scenes reward close attention to what characters say, what they withhold and how others interpret them.