Love Letters Of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1907)

Love Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne is the 1907 publication of the personal correspondence between Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, drawn from the years of their courtship in the late 1830s and early 1840s and from the letters they exchanged across their long marriage until Hawthorne’s death in 1864. The two volume collection was edited and prepared for publication by their son Julian Hawthorne, working with the family papers that had been preserved across the decades.

The letters give readers a remarkable window into the personal life of one of the major American writers of the nineteenth century. Hawthorne’s professional reputation has been built on the major novels and the celebrated short fiction, but his correspondence with Sophia shows a different and more intimate side of his personality. The young Hawthorne’s letters to his fiancee Sophia during the years before their marriage are tender, playful, and emotionally direct in ways that the public Hawthorne of the major fiction rarely allowed. The later letters from their years of marriage, including the years of his consular service in England in the 1850s, show the same combination of practical detail and deep affection across the long partnership.

Sophia Peabody Hawthorne was herself a remarkable figure, an accomplished artist and writer in her own right, and the correspondence shows the kind of intellectual and emotional partnership that the marriage represented. Her letters to Hawthorne, included in the collection alongside his to her, give readers her side of the long conversation that ran across their decades together.

The 1907 publication was edited with the kind of family piety that the Victorian era expected, with some of the more intimate material apparently moderated or omitted in ways that modern scholarly editions have since reconsidered. Even with the editorial interventions, the collection remains one of the most valuable primary sources for understanding Hawthorne’s personal life and the wider domestic context within which his major fiction was produced.

For Hawthorne scholars, for students of nineteenth century American literary biography, or for general readers interested in the personal lives of major American writers, the Love Letters are essential. The collection complements the major fiction by showing the personal life that the public reputation has often obscured, with the warm and intimate Hawthorne of the letters providing a useful counterpoint to the more austere Hawthorne of the major novels and the celebrated short fiction.