Doctor Grimshawe’s secret; a romance ..

Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s posthumous novel, left unfinished at his death in 1864 and published in 1882 under the editorial supervision of his son Julian Hawthorne. The novel was one of several major projects that Hawthorne had been working on simultaneously across his last years, and the various unfinished romances that he left behind have been the subject of substantial scholarly attention as windows into his late creative process.

The central premise of Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret involves an old American doctor who lives in a peculiar New England house with two children and a mysterious manuscript that points to an inheritance dispute reaching back to England. Hawthorne worked across the late period on multiple variations of the central American claimant theme, with the question of an American descendant of an English aristocratic family pursuing an inheritance claim back in England providing the structural framework for several of his unfinished late romances.

The novel has both the kind of atmospheric weight that Hawthorne’s best fiction reliably delivered and the structural roughness that comes from being left unfinished by its author. Julian Hawthorne’s editorial work brought the manuscript to publishable form, but the various plot threads do not always cohere with the kind of careful resolution that Hawthorne’s completed novels would have provided.

For Hawthorne completists, for students of his late creative period, or for readers interested in how the major novels he completed grew out of the wider creative work that he was undertaking simultaneously, Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret is essential.