Passages from a Relinquished Work

Passages from a Relinquished Work is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s shorter pieces, originally published in his 1842 collection Twice Told Tales. The piece presents itself as fragments from a longer abandoned project that Hawthorne had been working on, with the relinquished work framing giving the piece a particular fragmentary and exploratory quality that the format suits.

Hawthorne’s career produced multiple abandoned projects that he never completed in their original conceived forms, and the practice of publishing fragments and selections from these abandoned works was a way of salvaging some literary value from the time and effort he had invested in projects that did not reach completion. The Passages from a Relinquished Work format also let Hawthorne develop the kind of slightly experimental and atmospheric writing that the more conventional finished story would not always have supported.

The content of the various passages in the piece develops the kind of moral and atmospheric material that Hawthorne’s shorter work reliably worked with. For students of his creative process, the relinquished work pieces show how he developed material across multiple drafts and across multiple forms, with material that began in one project sometimes finding its way into completed works in other contexts.

For readers coming to Hawthorne through The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, Passages from a Relinquished Work shows him in a more experimental mode. For students of nineteenth century American literature or of Hawthorne’s wider catalogue, the piece is worth knowing.