Fanshawe

Fanshawe is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s first published novel, originally published anonymously in 1828 at his own expense and quickly suppressed by Hawthorne himself when he became dissatisfied with the result. Hawthorne attempted to recall and destroy as many copies as possible after publication, and the novel was not republished during his lifetime. After his death in 1864, the novel began to appear in editions of his complete works, and modern Hawthorne scholarship treats it as the foundational early work that anticipates many of the themes and techniques his later major novels would develop.

The novel is set at the fictional Harley College in early nineteenth century New England and follows the title character Fanshawe, a brilliant but physically frail young scholar whose intellectual life has consumed him to the point of damaging his health. The plot involves the kidnapping of the young woman Ellen Langton, the romantic complications between the various young men who are interested in her including Fanshawe and the more conventional Edward Walcott, and the eventual rescue and resolution that the genre conventions of the period required.

Fanshawe shows the young Hawthorne working out the techniques and themes that would become central to his later major fiction. The careful psychological observation of the central characters. The atmospheric New England settings. The moral complications that drive the plot beyond the standard romance conventions. The willingness to let the central character meet a fate that the more conventional novel would have avoided. All of these qualities that distinguish Hawthorne’s mature work are present in Fanshawe in early form.

The novel has both the strengths of an ambitious first work and the rough edges that Hawthorne himself recognized when he tried to suppress it. The plot is more conventional than his later work would be. The prose style is still developing toward the mature register of the major novels. And some of the structural choices reflect the early nineteenth century romance conventions that Hawthorne would later move past.

For Hawthorne completists, for students of his early creative development, or for readers interested in how the major novels he later produced grew out of the foundational early work, Fanshawe is essential.