> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.rebindclassics.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Introduction - URL: https://www.rebindclassics.com/the-scarlet-letter-introduction/ - Published: 2026-01-02T00:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-02T18:28:37.000Z - Description: Megan Marshall traces The Scarlet Letter past the Custom House firing to Hawthorne's boyhood among women and his long secret engagement to Sophia Peabody. - Author: Andrew Wessels - Tags: Megan Marshall on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, #video Megan Marshall opens Nathaniel Hawthorne's *The Scarlet Letter* with a confession: this is the book that made her a biographer. She read it as a high school junior in Pasadena, about as far from New England as you can get, and recognized in Hester Prynne the self-sufficient heroines of *Little Women*. From there she walks you through the life behind the novel: a sea captain father dead of yellow fever when Nathaniel was four, a boyhood among a widowed mother and two sisters, a twenties spent throwing out drafts in an upstairs Salem bedroom, and a secret three-year engagement to the artist Sophia Peabody. The turn is her reading of the Custom House chapter you're about to meet. Hawthorne's public story is that he found the letter at work; Marshall sees a longer, more personal gestation, and thinks the bitterness of his 1849 firing is all over the introduction. She leaves you with one instruction: don't skip the Custom House, whatever your teacher said. ## Transcript Hello, I'm Megan Marshall, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, and the Charles Wesley Emerson professor of Creative Writing at Emerson College in Boston. I'm so excited to be reading *The Scarlet Letter* with you. I first read the novel in high school and I've read it many times since in my work as a writer. It's the book that made me a biographer. It's also the book that best fits the description, the Great American Novel. No wonder most high school English teachers assign it to their students, but reading *The Scarlet Letter* is challenging. Hawthorne's language can seem old-fashioned, and it's sometimes hard to know how you're supposed to feel about the highly dramatic plot that unfolds. Hawthorne likes to play head games with his readers. If you read the book in high school and didn't get the point, or if your teacher skipped it and you're curious about what you missed, or if you'd just like to spend more time with a book you already love, now's your chance to find out why Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel has such staying power. First, let me tell you how *The Scarlet Letter* influenced my life. I was a public high school junior in Pasadena, California, about as far as you can go in the continental United States from New England where Hawthorne grew up and set most of his fiction. I'd always loved reading in my spare time, especially books like *Little Women* and *The Five Little Peppers* that happened to take place in New England. Now, in English class, we were assigned to read a book, a grown-up book set in the same corner of the world that had already grabbed my imagination. And although the author of *The Scarlet Letter* was a man, its protagonist was a woman who had the same characteristics I admired in the heroines of my favorite kids' books. Hester Prynne was willing to be different from other women. She was self-sufficient, brave, and smart, and she both suffered and learned from her mistakes. We all make mistakes. Or are our mistakes actually opportunities? Back then in high school and later in college, nobody taught students about the lives of the writers whose books they were reading. You were supposed to concentrate only on the text, maybe look for recurring symbols and images or deeper themes that were always described as conflicts and in the generic masculine "man versus man, man versus nature." But my early love for *Little Women*, which Louisa May Alcott based on her own family of four sisters, had clued me into the fact that there were real lives behind such stories. When I finished college, I decided to write a book about three real New England sisters, the Peabody sisters, who were actual heroines, all with very different personalities like the characters in the kids' books I loved. The best part was that one of the sisters, the youngest, Sophia, who was a talented artist, grew up to marry Nathaniel Hawthorne. *The Scarlet Letter* inspired me to become a biographer. I would find out that Nathaniel Hawthorne's marriage to Sophia Peabody was an important inspiration for him on the way to writing *The Scarlet Letter*. How did *The Scarlet Letter* come to be written? That's an important question because Hawthorne's introductory chapter, "The Custom House," which you'll be reading after I sign off, gives you his public answer, which created a furor in the city of Salem, Massachusetts, where he'd grown up and was living when he wrote the book. But although *The Scarlet Letter* was written at a white heat in little over six months after the incident he describes in his introduction, which we'll get to in a minute, I see the book's gestation as much longer and more personal. Nathaniel Hawthorne's father was a sea captain who was away from home for many months at a time. He was at sea when Nathaniel was born, and he died of yellow fever on a voyage to Surinam when the boy was just four years old. Hawthorne never recorded any memories of his father, and he grew up in a family of women, his widowed mother who never remarried, and an older and a younger sister. It's my belief that his upbringing among women gave Hawthorne the sympathy and understanding to create complex female characters. Sometimes the teenage Hawthorne wished he'd been born a girl, so he wouldn't be sent off to college at Bowdoin in Maine or have to choose a profession after he graduated. He never did take up one of the big three, law, medicine, or the ministry, that most college graduates pursued at the time. Instead, through his twenties, Hawthorne lived at home in Salem and wrote and wrote and wrote in his upstairs bedroom throwing out countless drafts. Fortunately, just as his mother's family business, a stagecoach company which had supported them all, was failing in the late 1830s when railroad lines were being laid all across New England, he began to have some success publishing short stories, many of them based on the historical incidents he loved to research, but publication in magazines didn't pay much, nor did his slim volume of stories, *Twice-Told Tales*, earn more than a hundred dollars in royalties. He took a paying job, a political appointment arranged for him by his Salem neighbor, the well-connected Elizabeth Peabody, as a measurer at the Custom House in Boston, spending his days on the docks, weighing and inventorying imported goods and trying not very successfully to keep up his writing. He'd also met and fallen in love with Elizabeth's sister, Sophia, whose drawings enchanted him, and they'd become secretly engaged, unsure of when they could afford to live together, but they were deeply committed to each other. Their love was "a bond between our souls," Hawthorne believed, stronger than any external rite. Marriage was a mere, if necessary, legality. They called each other husband and wife during the three years before they finally tied the knot. By then, Nathaniel was 36, Sophia 30. The couple moved to Concord, Massachusetts, to live in a house that Hawthorne named the Old Manse, rented to them by Ralph Waldo Emerson, where Hawthorne tried to support his growing family with his writing. The Hawthornes would have a daughter and a son before *The Scarlet Letter*, his first novel, was published in 1850. The couple was deliriously happy in Concord. Their friends included Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and the visiting feminist writer Margaret Fuller, the subject of my second biography. Hawthorne was publishing stories again, richer and deeper than his earlier ones. Marriage to Sophia had given him maturity, insight, and let's say it, full-bodied sexual experience. Did I mention that Nathaniel Hawthorne was extremely handsome, but also very shy? Again, his stories didn't pay, and after a few years, they left Concord, so Hawthorne could take another political appointment in a Custom House, this time in Salem, and one of the top jobs: surveyor. To economize, the family shared a house with Hawthorne's mother and two sisters, who increasingly looked to him for support as well. Here's where the Custom House introductory chapter comes in. All political appointments must come to an end, and Hawthorne's came to a particularly bad one. He'd hoped to stay on. He needed the salary, but with a new presidential administration coming in, he got the boot in 1849. The bitterness he felt is all over the Custom House chapter you're about to read. He gently or sometimes viciously ridicules the men he worked with, in one case, giving the man's name. The introduction and the novel were not popular at first in Salem, but *The Scarlet Letter*, written out of desperate financial need and the belated yet intense experience of passion Sophia Peabody brought to him as a husband and father, and in the wake of yet another great calamity, his mother's death at age 68, made his name and boosted his fortunes. Nathaniel Hawthorne would write two more novels and a campaign biography of his college friend, President Franklin Pierce, before he had to work at another desk job, and that one would take the whole family to Europe. What does a political appointment in Salem's Custom House in the 1840s have to do with a tale of intrigue drawn from colonial times and set in Boston? You'll find out as you encounter one of the most marvelous and memorable plot devices in literary history and a masterful transition from fact to fiction that I want you to experience without interruption. For that reason, I'm going to let you read on into the first two short chapters of *The Scarlet Letter*: "The Prison Door" and "The Marketplace," before we talk again. Some teachers let their students skip the Custom House chapter, but don't do it. There will be high rewards and you'll get comfortable with Hawthorne's ironic sense of humor, which moves into the background once the novel gets going, but it's still there. Look out for the occasional touch of humor or irony as you challenge yourself to interpret this tale from almost 400 years in the past, written from Hawthorne's present, and absolutely spot-on relevant today. See you on the other side of the prison door.