Letters to His Children [with Biographical Introduction]
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Kindle Edition Verified Purchase. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne is a classic But, besides being a classic, it is also a very good book, and I enjoyed it immensely, though the ending was disappointing in that it was a little vague as to the fates of some of the characters. The book starts off with Hester Prynne, the main character, being led up on the scaffold for the public to gawk at. She has been charged with adultery, which is obviously true because she has a baby and her husband hasn't been around in ages.
However, she refuses to give up the name of her fellow adulterer. To her dress is pinned a scarlet letter, and she is released, but she'll spend the rest of her life being shunned and stared at. The real beauty of The Scarlet Letter is the rich language never found in contemporary works. It gives you a real mental workout, and it's absolutely beautiful.
The characters are well-developed and interesting. The story is also interesting, though very sad. It shows the strictness of Puritan beliefs in the s, it shows the difference between a person bearing shame and a person bearing secret guilt, it shows the price of sin and the gift of forgiveness. The Scarlet Letter is a true masterpiece. Of course, this is a classic piece of American literature.
E. B. White
I had seen a dramatization of it on TV some years ago but until recently had not gotten around to reading it. The book is structured differently from the drama. Modern readers may find the sentences tryingly long and the sentiments unimaginable. However, clearly Hawthorne was a genius for he packs two or three reflections into every sentence and winds them about the characters flawlessly. If one can set aside modern concepts of behavior and Hemingway model sentence structure it is a rewarding read. The book deals intimately with internal conflicts in the characters rather than actions, which principally serve only to divulge thoughts and feelings.
A masterpiece of 19th century American literature, and a glimpse into the lives of the early Puritans Boston, s. The prologue, leading to the tale of the discovery of the story the Scarlet Letter is presented as a story-within-a-story is long and leaves the reader impatient. Since it pertains to a different location and time from the main story, it is not quite clear how it enhances the tale. The depictions of human feelings are exquisitely detailed, which is fairly remarkable because they are almost invariably gloomy feelings of guilt and shame.
The pace, very slow at first, picks up towards the dramatic denouement, followed by a rather unsatisfactory conclusion. One wishes that the author would have thumbed his nose at the Puritans and allowed Hester Prynne a happy life ever after, but Hawthorne does not violate the moral conventions of the age and the conclusion would therefore have satisfied the most moralistic readers.
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No happy ending here, except for the one innocent character, so everyone who sinned paid the price, amen. Seen in the light of the moral tradition in which the novel is set, and the barely less strict society in which it was written, the quality of the writing serves the purpose of moral edification beautifully.
The long sentence, with their complex embedded clauses and dated vocabulary, is sometimes hard to follow, but always limpid once parsed. In that sense it is reminiscent of another moral tale of the age, Melville's Moby Dick, minus the see and with a different capital sin involved. Overall, this is one of the canons of literature that should be part of the weel-educated reader's collection.
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Catalog Record: Letters of Lydia Maria Child : with a | Hathi Trust Digital Library
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AmazonGlobal Ship Orders Internationally. Amazon Inspire Digital Educational Resources. Amazon Rapids Fun stories for kids on the go. Theirs was a loving marriage of like minds in political matters, though David's ardor for good causes drew him into one impractical venture after another. The following year Maria published The Frugal Housewife , describing her ingenious methods of making do with little means. The popularity of the book helped to keep the household afloat as the couple moved from one temporary home to another.
Maria wrote five volumes of the Ladies Family Library , short biographies exemplifying feminine virtues, published from to , for the growing audience of middle-class women. In William Lloyd Garrison began publication of his abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator.
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Maria later recalled that Garrison "got hold of the strings of my conscience, and pulled me into Reforms. Old dreams vanished, old associates departed, and all things became new. May , she began to write for the cause. Outspoken in her condemnation of slavery, she pointed out its contradiction with Christian teachings, described the moral and physical degradation it brought upon slaves and owners alike, not omitting the issue of miscegenation, and not excepting the North from its share of responsibility for the system.
Sales of her books fell off, publishers refused to accept anything she wrote, and she lost her editorial post with The Juvenile Miscellany. The already strapped Childs paid a steep price, but more abolitionist tracts and stories followed. She and David were listed together on the masthead, but he stayed behind attempting to start a sugar beet industry in Massachusetts. Garrison advocated staying out of government, even to the extent of refusing to vote, as a protest against union with slaveholders. New York abolitionists opposed his position, and Maria, who had built the Standard 's circulation as a family newspaper, felt it would alienate the audience she wished to reach with an antislavery appeal.
She separated from the movement but stayed on in New York and continued writing. Still hungry for a satisfying church affiliation, she commented, "The Unitarian meetings here chill me with their cold intellectual respectability. The art and music in the city fed her soul, though she was appalled by the poverty.
She published Letters from New York , and , popular collections of her regular columns in the Standard. Fortunately, New York State law allowed Maria to separate her income from David's and to build up some savings protected from his debts.
Letters of Lydia Maria Child: with a biographical introduction by John G. Whittier ; and Main Author: Child, Lydia Maria, Language(s): English. Author: Child, Lydia Maria Francis, Title: Letters of Lydia Maria Child, with a biographical introduction by John G. Whittier and an appendix by.
Returning to Massachusetts, the Childs settled in the Wayland home of Maria's aging father, with occasional intervals, her home for the rest of her life. She intended these volumes to remove "the superstitious rubbish from the sublime morality of Christ" and to give respectful attention to other world religions. Despite the immense labor of her research and positive reviews, the work did not sell well.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson commented that it was "too learned for a popular book and too popular for a learned one. When John Brown raided the Harper's Ferry arsenal, his example, Maria wrote, "stirred me up to consecrate myself with renewed earnestness to the righteous cause for which he died so bravely.
She sent a copy of her letter to Governor Henry Wise of Virginia, who responded condemning Brown's action. When the correspondence was published in the New York Tribune , Maria received a flood of congratulations from the North and condemnation from the South. Living in Medford for the winter of , Maria plunged into Boston activism, writing that "When there is anti-slavery work to be done, I feel as young as twenty.
After the war Maria supported the suffrage cause. She was a founder of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, though she believed black men should have the vote first. She also renewed her work on behalf of Native Americans, deploring the requirement that Cherokees leave their tribal lands and upholding the right of native people to their own language and religion. When a group of Unitarians founded the Free Religious Association in , Maria discovered their viewpoint agreed with her own.
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She attended FRA meetings regularly during her stays in Boston, more frequent after David's death in In she published her own "eclectic Bible" of quotations from the world's religions, Aspirations of the World , her motive, "to do all I can to enlarge and strengthen the hand of human brotherhood. Wendell Phillips gave the eulogy in a service at her Wayland home.
She was "ready to die for a principle and starve for an idea," Phillips said.