About the Book
The marriage of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne—for their contemporaries a model of true love and married happiness—was also a scene of revulsion and combat. T. Walter Herbert reveals the tragic conflicts beneath the Hawthorne's ideal of domestic fulfillment and shows how their marriage reflected the tensions within nineteenth-century society. In so doing he sheds new light on Hawthorne's fiction with its obsessive themes of guilt and grief balked feminism and homosexual seduction adultery patricide and incest.