Gules

Marshall starts with the last word of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. 'GULES' is a Middle English word for red, and it turns the letter on Hester and Arthur's shared tombstone into a coat of arms, a Puritan punishment recast as glory. The stone, she notes, isn't in King's Chapel burial ground, whatever Hawthorne claims. She quotes his account of reading the last scene to Sophia, whose headache he counted 'a triumphant success.'

Next, what the book is for now. Marshall takes on the critics who call Hawthorne a misogynist for punishing his brilliant women, and answers with a question of her own: how many women get through life without feeling the unequal position of the sexes, and how many men get that? She reads Hester's prophecy of 'a surer ground of mutual happiness,' calls the novel a Me Too story of a smeared woman and an unpunished partner, and ends with Margaret Fuller's verdict on Hawthorne's tenderness toward the heart of a woman.