Browne’s Folly

Browne’s Folly is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s shorter pieces, a sketch rather than a story in the strictest sense, drawn from the New England regional materials that occupied so much of his career. Hawthorne was the descendant of Puritan settlers in Salem, Massachusetts, and he spent his entire writing life working through the moral and historical legacies of the region where his family had lived for almost two centuries. His major novels, including The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, are the most famous results of that engagement, but his shorter sketches and tales make up a significant body of work that often gets overshadowed by the novels.

The sketch turns on the figure of an old colonial era house known locally as Browne’s Folly, named after the eccentric ancestor who built it on a scale his family could not afford to maintain. Hawthorne uses the building as a starting point for the kind of meditation on time, memory, and the long shadow of past decisions that his readers know from his other regional pieces. The mood is the characteristic Hawthorne mood, melancholy without being sentimental, attentive to the strangeness of how the past clings to physical places long after the people who made it are gone.

Readers coming to Hawthorne through his major novels may find the sketch slighter than they expect, but the sketches are part of how he developed the imagination that would later produce the novels. 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 short story, 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 Browne’s Folly as one of many similar pieces, each working some small corner of the New England landscape Hawthorne knew so well.