Arthur and Hester

Hester and Arthur finally meet in the woods, in Marshall's favorite chapters of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. She stays first with Hester's memory of Roger Prynne and the word Hawthorne dares to use for what she feels about him now: hate. For Dimmesdale, the pale and powerful preacher, she offers William Ellery Channing, who held Boston on his every whisper. For Hester with her hair let down, Sophia Peabody, who once wrote of sending her hair 'streaming like a comet.'

The two women you wouldn't have guessed are Hawthorne's reclusive older sister Elizabeth, of whom his son said 'You look at her and see woman, but think man,' and Margaret Fuller, whose Woman in the Nineteenth Century supplies Hester's talk of tearing society down and building it anew. Marshall closes on what Hawthorne's circle learned in 1849: Fuller had fallen in love in Italy and given birth in secret. She leaves you asking what becomes of Hester, Arthur, and Pearl.