THE CROW ON THE SPRUCE, Chenoweth Hall, Puckerbrush Press, Orono, Maine, 183 pages, $9.95.

Chenoweth Hall, who died last year at age 90, was something of a Renaissance woman in the arts. Brought up in New York City, she studied architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright at the University of Wisconsin and music at Juilliard. An accomplished violinist, she wrote libretto for opera and ballet.

After moving to Prospect Harbor, Maine, in the early 1940s, Hall befriended artists John Marin and Marsden Hartley and was inspired by their example to paint the coast. She created an inspired body of work, including sculpture, that continues to attract art lovers, as witness several exhibitions over the past few years in Maine and elsewhere.

Hall also made a name for herself as a writer. In 1946 Houghton Mifflin published “The Crow on the Spruce,” a novel set in the fictitious Down East village of Millbank. The story revolves around the town’s sardine factory and the mysterious murder of its owner, Carl Alders, whose “ideas of power and estate” made life miserable for most of the townspeople. As one of the men notes, “[Carl] bankrupt this village of everything a village grows on.”

The first words of the book immediately engage the reader: “Death in a house, even where there are five little boys, makes itself felt by a peculiar vacuous stillness that penetrates, seeps in, and settles.” This finely wrought sentence alerts us to the high level of writing to follow.

Hall had an exceptional eye for detail. A description of the village store, for example, captures the poetic disorder of its goods. Likewise, the clothing cart of the traveling salesman, Mr. Polusky, is presented with realistic precision. In a nod to changing times, Mr. Polusky recognizes that his line of business is doomed due to the proliferation of automobiles.

Hall brought a painter’s eye to her renderings of the landscape.

“The stiff blue sky almost crackled like paper,” reads one passage, “and behind the midnight green spires of the spruces in a low band around the earth were thick white clouds like cotton that had been poked behind the trees and strung from branch to branch, making a puffy border of white around the world.”

Along with this eye came a fine ear for language — as if Hall had spent years in the general store listening to her neighbors. The transcribed talk is often a welter of apostrophes. Here’s a sample, from the mouth of Emmaline Clark, one of the novel’s central characters: “Th’ men ‘n this town’s gots much backbone’s one o’ them jellyfish flat out on th’ sand beach over there.”

At times, there is a touch of “Bert and I,” as when Old Jim Slater relates the tale of a fisherman who caulked his leaking boat by running it up on the mussel flats. “That slimy mud’d fill up those warps ‘n’ cracks good,” he tells his listeners.

The novel has a distinct social realist feel to it. The rough life of the seasonal sardine factory worker offered the occasion for writing about injustice. As Abner Smith, the philosophical store owner puts it, “It happens that we live our lives in small puddles. That’s where things have to happen — for most of us.” The rift between natives and summer people represents another motif of inequality.

“The Crow on the Spruce” stands among a group of exceptional works about small town Maine published in the ’30s, ’40s and ‘5Os, many of them written by women. One thinks of Emily Muir’s “Small Potatoes,” Louise Dickinson Rich’s “The Peninsula” and the novels of Ruth Moore and Eleanor Mayo. All of them were seeking to represent a special world, a Maine coast equivalent, if you will, of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County.

Hall displays a bit of the Mississippi master’s style toward the end of the book:

“He [Harvey Clark] knew it all: Carl’s death, Em’s sordid attempt at unfaithfulness, the innocent burden of Old Jim — every climax of their lives that led to anticlimax. The pattern of a fatiguing human spirit, devitalized by something that has gradually become inherent: a lessening regard of personal rights and capabilities, a final apathetic acceptance of their own limitations. And beneath it all a struggling fundamental decency and stability that kept righting them back into the routine from which they all longed for some legitimate escape.”

Chenoweth Hall captured a time and a place with realistic rigor and polished prose. Puckerbrush Press has done us all a favor in bringing this book back into print.

Carl Little wrote the foreword to a new edition of Rachel Field’s classic Down East tale, “God’s Pocket.” He directs the Blum Gallery at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor.