The White Old Maid

The White Old Maid is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s shorter pieces, originally published in 1835 and later collected in his Twice Told Tales collection. The story is one of his more atmospheric and gothic shorter pieces, with the central premise involving a mysterious figure called the White Old Maid who appears at funerals across many years in a particular New England town.

The White Old Maid of the title is a strange recurring figure whose appearances at the funerals of various community members across the decades have made her into a kind of local legend. The story slowly develops the wider context of who she actually is, what particular history connects her to the various deaths she has been attending, and what the mystery of her continuing presence in the community actually represents. The story is among Hawthorne’s more directly gothic pieces, with the strange figure and the recurring funeral setting giving the piece an atmospheric weight that some of his lighter sketches do not have.

Hawthorne uses the gothic framework to develop the kind of moral and historical material that his best shorter fiction reliably worked with. The White Old Maid’s connection to a particular old wrong and her decades long pursuit of the moral closure that the wrong has produced give the story its emotional center, with the resolution of her long quest providing the closing material that the wider story has been building toward.

For readers coming to Hawthorne through The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, The White Old Maid shows him at his most directly gothic. For students of nineteenth century American literature, of the gothic tradition in American writing, or of Hawthorne’s wider catalogue, the story is worth knowing.