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 . . .’