Sylph Etherege

Sylph Etherege is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s shorter pieces, originally published in The Token annual gift book in 1838 and later collected in his Snow Image and Other Twice Told Tales collection of 1851. The story is a brief romance that works through the kind of psychological and moral material that distinguishes Hawthorne’s shorter fiction.

The Sylph of the title is the central young female character whose unusual emotional and imaginative sensitivity gives the story its central interest. The Etherege family situation that the story develops involves the kind of complicated romantic and moral tangles that Hawthorne’s shorter fiction reliably worked with, with the central characters having to navigate situations that the rigid social codes of the period made particularly difficult.

Hawthorne uses the situation to develop the kind of careful psychological observation that his best shorter work shows. The various characters’ interior lives, their misperceptions of each other, the moral complications of the situation, and the eventual resolution of the romantic plot all unfold across the relatively short page count with the kind of attention that Hawthorne’s mature shorter fiction reliably delivered.

For students of nineteenth century American literature or of Hawthorne’s wider catalogue, Sylph Etherege is one of many similar shorter pieces that fill out the wider Twice Told Tales and related collections.