Stricken by guilt, Dimmesdale becomes increasingly ill. When he learns that the man in question is Arthur Dimmesdale, a saintly young minister who is the leader of those exhorting her to name the child’s father, Chillingworth proceeds to torture the minister with the knowledge of his sinful secret. After Hester refuses to name her lover, Chillingworth becomes obsessed with uncovering his identity. He finds his wife forced to wear the scarlet letter A on her dress as punishment for her adultery. At the time of conception, Hester believed that she was a widow, but her husband, Roger Chillingworth, arrives in New England very much alive and conceals his identity. The main character is Hester Prynne, a young woman who has borne a child out of wedlock. The setting is the superstitious Puritan community of Boston in the seventeenth century. Although it was published in 1850, the major theme of shaming and social stigmatizing is just as relevant today. The Scarlet Letter is a classic of American literature. Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers – stern and wild ones – and they made her strong, but taught her much amiss.’ Nathaniel Hawthorne ‘The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. The first edition of The Scarlet Letter sold out in ten days and “made Hawthorne’s fame, changed his fortune and gave to our literature its first symbolic novel a year before the appearance of Melville’s Moby-Dick” (Bradley).David Stuart Davies looks at Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic American novel, a tale of sin, guilt and redemption set in Massachusetts in the mid-seventeenth Century She becomes the archetype of the free-thinking American woman grappling with herself and her sexuality in a cold, patriarchal society" (The Guardian). Hawthorne's achievement is to make her passion noble, her defiance heartbreaking and her frailty inspiring. "The most memorable and original aspect of The Scarlet Letter lies in Hawthorne's portrait of Hester Prynne, who has been described as "the first true heroine of American fiction", a woman whose experience evokes the biblical fate of Eve. A near fine example with minor rubbing to the extremities, with the spine gilt title quite bright. First edition, with 4 pages publisher’s advertisements inserted between preliminary blanks, dated March 1, 1850.
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