Mosses from an Old Manse and other stories

Mosses from an Old Manse is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s second major short story collection, originally published in 1846. The Old Manse of the title is the historic Concord, Massachusetts house where Hawthorne and his new wife Sophia lived for several years in the early 1840s, and the title sketch that opens the collection is a long reflective essay about the house, its history, and the wider Concord intellectual community that Hawthorne and Sophia had become part of during their residence there.

The collection includes some of Hawthorne’s most famous short stories. Young Goodman Brown, the haunting moral allegory about a Salem villager and his nighttime journey into the forest. The Birthmark, the dark scientific allegory about a husband’s obsession with removing his wife’s facial mark. Rappaccini’s Daughter, the gothic romance about a poison garden and the young woman raised within it. The Artist of the Beautiful, the meditation on artistic creation and the materialistic culture that fails to recognize what the artist has produced. Roger Malvin’s Burial, the haunting story about guilt and unburied debt that runs across decades. And many other shorter pieces.

The Mosses collection represents Hawthorne at the height of his short story powers, with the various pieces showing the range and the depth that his shorter fiction was capable of. Herman Melville’s famous review of the collection in 1850, written before the two writers had met but after Melville had been impressed by the depth he found in Hawthorne, helped establish the wider critical recognition of what Hawthorne was actually doing in his fiction. Melville’s review remains one of the most important early critical statements on Hawthorne and on the wider question of what serious American literature could be.

The collection also includes various lighter sketches alongside the major moral allegories. The juxtaposition of the lighter material with the darker pieces is part of what gives the collection its particular character, with Hawthorne’s range as a writer being on full display across the different registers and modes that the various pieces work in.

For readers new to Hawthorne, Mosses from an Old Manse is an excellent starting point. For longtime Hawthorne readers, the collection rewards rereading, with the various pieces continuing to deepen across multiple encounters. For students of nineteenth century American literature, the collection is essential.