Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Hawthorne, Nathaniel

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

The Scarlet Letter, [4] 60; The Marble Faun, [86] 62

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20250601100037 Margaret Drabble on The Marble Faun SF Issue 86

Italian Hours

Margaret Drabble on Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun

I discovered Nathaniel Hawthorne’s luminous novel The Marble Faun (1860) after a self-imposed delay of over sixty years. When I was reading English at Cambridge in the late 1950s, the only Hawthorne on the syllabus was The Scarlet Letter (see SF no.60). It had a powerful and lowering effect on me, and I don’t think I ever reread it, though I alluded to it in my third novel, The Millstone, where the narrator Rosamund at one point states that she ‘walked around with a scarlet letter embroidered upon [her] bosom . . . but the A stood for Abstinence, not for Adultery . . .’
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The Price of Addle Tree

Irma Kurtz on Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

Not many pleasures attach to growing old. And as former pleasures pass away one by one, fewer still emerge, new and unrehearsed. Reading, albeit more slowly and through spectacles, remains a source of knowledge and provides the increasingly rare frisson of sheer delight. Most unexpectedly in my perilously lengthening lifetime, however, arrived the spanking new and rejuvenating joy of rereading.

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