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Mary Peters
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Follow the life of the strong and independent Mary Peters from her adventurous life at sea with her family at age nine to her later years as she comes to terms with the hometown that is almost unrecognizable from the vibrant seafaring town it once was. Mary Peters is filled with romance and delightful descriptions of life and residents Down East a century ago.
Mary Peters is the first of Chase's highly acclaimed and bestselling
Maine novels, capturing in vivid, compelling detail and historical accuracy
a period of transition and turmoil along the coast of Maine in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The novel is filled with wonderful
details of the natural world, both at sea and on land. It also captures
the pervasive changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution as coastal
people stood on the brink of a new world, slowly turning from the glorious
era of sail to serving the incoming tide of wealthy summer vacationers.
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About the Author Mary Ellen Chase (1887-1973) was born and raised in Blue Hill, Maine. She graduated from the University of Maine and earned a Ph.D from the University of Minnesota before serving 30 years as a leading faculty member at Smith College in Massachusetts. She wrote more than 30 books, many using her cherished Maine heritage as the setting, capturing the unique spirit and chronicling a way of life for generations. She stood as one of the leading writers of her era. |
Excerpt from Mary Peters :
At twelve o'clock, Mary thought, as she descended the hill in the hope of a letter from Hester, the village no longer belonged to its rightful owners. She felt shy in the presence of these strangers even though they paid no attention to her as she wove her way among them to the post office.
Sarah Peters did not feel shy among them. As persons they meant nothing to her in one way or another. But their invasion of the coast meant not a little in that it marked a change as summary and sweeping as it was inevitable. They themselves were not the cause of it; perhaps instead they were a result. Change, she knew, was a law of life and time, moving no one knew how or why, triumphant over what seemed to be its causes. And change was remaking the coast even as it had remade the life upon the seas.
Like all persons who cherish values within or without themselves she cherished the seafaring heritage of Maine. It was her own, descended to her and to others through many generations, and she could not hold it lightly. She had been born into a family and married into another in which foreign ports were household words, in which men and women and even children bridged the Seven Seas in their thoughts. She wanted passionately that those thoughts should remain, and she saw them fading into obscurity. There was something immeasurably sad to her in the sight of a grandson of a shipmaster in the foreign trade shingling the roof of a summer cottage for his livelihood. There was something sadder in the knowledge that the strangers, who by their demands supplied that livelihood, knew little and cared less for the boy's history. The coast to them was beautiful; they came to it for health and pleasure; but the traditions which clothed its rocks, filled its harbours, and gave meaning to its high, stony fields and pastures were not inherent to them. These strangers in another decade would be purchasing for their summer homes the houses built by sea captains; and in yet another decade the last remnant of that sturdy, irreplaceable race would have vanished.