The Scarlet Letter
First published 1800 · English · 172 pages
- Novels
- Historical fiction
- Love and romance
Set in seventeenth-century Puritan Boston, this novel follows Hester Prynne, a young woman who has borne a child outside marriage and is made to wear a scarlet letter on her dress as public punishment. She refuses to name the child's father and lives at the edge of the town, raising her daughter Pearl with fierce independence. Around her, other characters carry their own hidden burdens, including a respected minister and a mysterious physician. The book is a study of sin, shame, hypocrisy and the cost of a rigid community. It is often seen as one of the first great American novels.
Quotes
Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!
She had not known the weight, until she felt the freedom.
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognised it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.