![]() ![]() It is more of a “the past is always with us” story, with the emphasis on ancestral guilt strangling families through the generations. And it has a mystery embedded in its core. It’s what the Romantic and Victorian eras called a “gothic romance,” to be sure. I reread it last month and discovered that memory misled me even more than with The Scarlet Letter. What I remembered was a ghost story of sorts, not as wild as an Edgar Allan Poe story but in that vein. ![]() I wondered if the same thing would be true of Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables, which I first and last read about that same 50 years ago. It’s an exploration of guilt, love, steadfastness, loyalty, and redemption. ![]() The novel is actually much more substantive - the story of a woman of rather independent mind caught between the opposing demands of her lover and those of her husband. Superficially, the book tells the story of a woman in Puritan Boston who gives birth out of wedlock, is shunned and condemned by her fellow citizens, and thumbs her nose at them by embroidering a scarlet letter “A” on her dress. I recently reread it and discovered it was nothing like what I remembered, or what I thought I remembered. ![]() I first read The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) 50 years ago. ![]()
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