The Blithedale Romance
First published 1852 · English · 206 pages
- Novels
- Historical fiction
- Dystopia
Narrated by the poet Miles Coverdale, this novel is set in a small farming community near Boston, where idealistic men and women try to live by shared labor and high principles. Coverdale joins them and watches the people around him, especially the forceful reformer Hollingsworth, the dazzling Zenobia and the frail, mysterious Priscilla. Hawthorne drew on his own brief stay at the Brook Farm utopian experiment, but the story is fiction. It looks at the gap between noble ideals and human pride, desire and jealousy, and at the uncertain role of an observer who watches life more than he lives it.
Quotes
then. The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove
The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom to know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed.
I seriously wished—selfish as it may appear—that the reformation of society had been postponed about half a century, or, at all events, to such a date as should have put my intermeddling with it entirely out of the question.
It is because the spirit is inestimable that the lifeless body is so little valued.