Beneath an Umbrella

Beneath an Umbrella is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s shorter pieces, originally published in his 1837 collection Twice Told Tales. The piece is a sketch in the personal essay tradition that Hawthorne worked in alongside his more famous novels and tales. The premise is built around the experience of walking through a New England town in the rain under an umbrella, with the umbrella functioning as both literal shelter and as a frame that limits and shapes what the walker can see and engage with.

The sketch turns on the kinds of small observations that the rain walk allows. The various people the walker encounters, each pursuing their own business in the wet weather. The architecture of the town as it appears through the falling rain. The particular quality of the light and the air during a rainy day in the small New England town that Hawthorne knew so well. And the slowly developing reflective voice of the walker himself, who uses the limited frame of the umbrella and the slowed pace of the rain walk as occasions for the kind of meditation on memory, time, and the small details of ordinary life that Hawthorne’s reflective sketches reliably delivered.

What makes the sketch interesting beyond its initial atmospheric appeal is what it reveals about Hawthorne as a writer of place. The New England small town he is depicting was the kind of community he had grown up in and that he would return to repeatedly across his fiction, and Beneath an Umbrella shows him at his most direct in his engagement with the physical and social texture of that world. The sketch is shorter and more atmospheric than the major moral allegories of his novels, but the careful observation and the slow reflective voice that distinguishes his major work are very much present here in compressed form.

Readers coming to Hawthorne through The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables may find the sketch slighter than they expect, but the personal essay mode is one Hawthorne worked in throughout his career. The reflective voice, the moral attention to small details, the willingness to let an essay tip into a tale and back again, are all on display here in compressed form. For students of nineteenth century American literature, of New England regional writing, or of the development of the American personal essay, Hawthorne’s shorter pieces are essential reading.

The sketch is brief and well suited to a single sitting. Anyone reading their way through Hawthorne’s collected works will encounter Beneath an Umbrella as one of many similar pieces in the Twice Told Tales collection, each working some small corner of the New England world Hawthorne knew so well.