Hildegarde Hawthorne

Hildegarde Hawthorne built a varied American career as a poet, biographer, travel writer, and short-story author concerned with literary history and regional observation. Poems is an early collection issued by Richard G. Badger in Boston. Google Play’s digitized edition records the author, publisher, and compact thirty-seven-page extent, while the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America identifies a first edition and calls it Hawthorne’s second book. Hawthorne was the daughter of Julian Hawthorne and granddaughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne, but her own bibliography extended well beyond family history. She wrote biographies of American literary and political figures, accounts of New England and California places, children’s work, and supernatural fiction. This collection belongs to the beginning of a long, varied career rather than representing its whole direction. Readers approaching the collection can place it alongside her later interest in landscape, memory, and literary inheritance. Its concise form offers evidence of the poetic practice that accompanied Hawthorne’s better-documented work as a biographer and travel observer.