"Cliff Notes - House of Seven Gables" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

overtones. The vision of the haunted young Hester on the
scaffold with the scarlet "A"--standing for adulteress--on her
breast is among the most memorable portraits in all
literature.

When Hawthorne began to write The House of the Seven Gables
the following year, he was already an acclaimed writer. Unlike
The Scarlet Letter, which is about events in the seventeenth
century, The House of the Seven Gables is set in Hawthorne's own
era, in 1850. But its main theme is how the past weighs on the
present. Hawthorne's ancestor, John Hathorne (Nathaniel added
the "w" to his last name), had been one of three judges in the
notorious Salem witchcraft trials in 1692, and Hawthorne may
have been trying to rid his family of that shame when, at the
beginning of The House of the Seven Gables, he wrote so
eloquently of that terrible time.

About his own work, Hawthorne said, "The House of the Seven
Gables, in my opinion, is better than The Scarlet Letter but I
should not wonder if I had refined upon the principal character
a little too much for the public appreciation; nor if the
romance of the book should be found somewhat at odds with the
humble and familiar scenery in which I invested it."

The poet James Russell Lowell called The House of the Seven
Gables "the most valuable contribution to New England history
that has been made," and Sophia Hawthorne, in a letter to her
mother, said about the novel, "How you will enjoy the book, its
depth of wisdom, its high tone, the flowers of Paradise
scattered over all the dark places."

The House of the Seven Gables had been written in the
Berkshire Mountains where the Hawthornes had a home in Lenox,
Massachusetts. While there, Hawthorne was visited by an
admirer, Herman Melville, who lived in nearby Pittsfield and was
writing Moby-Dick at that time. Melville thought so much of his
shy friend that he dedicated Moby-Dick to Hawthorne.

Melville was greatly impressed with The House of the Seven
Gables, telling Hawthorne that he "spent almost an hour in each
separate gable." And Henry James, a consummate writer himself,
honored Hawthorne as "the first great writer of the tradition of
psychological, subjective fiction in American literature." James
added that Hawthorne "had a cat-like faculty of seeing in the
dark," referring to Hawthorne's genius for illuminating the dark
corners of those people who lead lives of quiet desperation.

Others who came to see Hawthorne often remarked about his
physical attractiveness. The British novelist Anthony Trollope
called him "the handsomest of all Yankees," and Julia Ward Howe,