Septimius Felton

Septimius Felton, or The Elixir of Life is an unfinished novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne, left incomplete at his death in 1864 and published posthumously by his daughter Una in 1872. It is one of the substantial fragments from the troubled last years of his career, when he was struggling to complete several long projects on the theme of immortality and was unable to bring any of them to a fully finished state.

The novel is set in the years around the American Revolution. Septimius Felton is a young man of partly English and partly Native American ancestry who has been preparing for the Christian ministry but whose plans are disrupted by the outbreak of the war. The opening chapters follow him through the engagements at Lexington and Concord, where he kills a young British officer in a confrontation on a hillside near his Massachusetts home. The dying officer gives him a manuscript that contains the formula for an elixir of life.

The rest of the surviving novel follows Septimius’s slow pursuit of the elixir formula, his obsessive efforts to gather the ingredients, his neglect of his fiancée and his community in pursuit of the dream of immortal life, and his complicated relationship with the strange young woman Sybil Dacy who appears at the house and who seems to know more about the elixir than she is willing to say. Hawthorne never finished the novel and the surviving manuscript breaks off before the central question is resolved.

The novel is interesting now mostly as an example of Hawthorne’s late preoccupation with the question of immortality, a subject he was unable to handle successfully in any of his late projects. The fragment shows the characteristic Hawthorne combination of historical specificity, moral seriousness, and quasi supernatural premise.