> ## 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. # The Three Women Inside the Fiction - URL: https://www.rebindclassics.com/three-women-inside-scarlet-letter/ - Published: 2026-07-28T22:09:17.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-02T18:29:02.000Z - Description: Sophia Peabody married Hawthorne, Elizabeth published him, Margaret Fuller may have shaped Hester — Marshall reads the real women stitched into the novel. - Author: Andrew Wessels - Tags: Megan Marshall on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, #context Behind Hester Prynne stand three real women, and Megan Marshall knows them better than almost anyone alive. Her first biography, The Peabody Sisters, spent two decades reconstructing the lives of Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody, the New England sisters at the center of [the Transcendentalist world](https://www.rebindclassics.com/concord-genius-of-a-place/). One of them married Nathaniel Hawthorne. Another published him. A third may have given him Hester. Reading The Scarlet Letter alongside Marshall's Rebind commentary means seeing the actual women whose lives left their marks all over the fiction. Sophia is the one Hawthorne married, and Marshall traces the marriage back to a collaboration. Sophia was a working visual artist, and she fell for Hawthorne partly by illustrating one of his stories. "They in fact fell in love partly because she just decided to illustrate one of his stories called the Gentle Boy," Marshall says. They published it together as what Hawthorne called a thrice-told tale, his words plus her picture plus the act of retelling. Marshall reads Sophia's visual imagination directly into the novel's structure, its Madonna-and-child imagery, its triptych shape, its almost cinematic sense of staged scenes. "He viewed visual art as a kind of telling," she says, and the book that came out of his marriage to a painter is built like a sequence of paintings. ## **Elizabeth Peabody and the Making of Pearl** Elizabeth, the eldest sister, is the one who found Hawthorne and the one who published him. Marshall tells the story of how the Peabodys discovered who had written the anonymous tales circulating in Salem. Elizabeth guessed it was the bright older sister, Elizabeth Hawthorne, and could not believe it turned out to be "her little brother Nathaniel." But Elizabeth Peabody leaves a deeper mark on the novel than as a literary discoverer, and Marshall finds it in Pearl. Elizabeth had a foundational childhood memory that turned her against Calvinist doctrine for life: asked the catechism question, [who made you](https://www.rebindclassics.com/i-have-no-heavenly-father/), a five-year-old Elizabeth answered "a man," picturing a benign human figure, and was shoved off the older girl's lap in horror. Her mother corrected her. The right answer was God. Elizabeth never forgot the fear that replaced her own intuitive, benevolent image, and she resolved to raise her younger sister Sophia free of those terrible doctrines. Marshall reads that anti-Calvinist mission straight into the passages about Pearl, [the wild child who is a law unto herself](https://www.rebindclassics.com/scarlet-letter-a-meaning/). Hawthorne describes Pearl as a being who must be permitted to live her own life, a creature made afresh out of new elements, her eccentricities not to be reckoned to her for a crime. "It's as if he's written out exactly what Elizabeth wanted to instill in her sister," Marshall says. "This is [self reliance](https://www.rebindclassics.com/was-thoreau-selfish-self-reliance/), this is self education, this is religion coming from within." Pearl, in this reading, is a Transcendentalist child, raised on the page according to the philosophy Elizabeth Peabody spent her life building. ## **Was Hester Prynne Margaret Fuller?** The third woman is the one who may have given Hawthorne his heroine, and here Marshall is both generous and skeptical. Margaret Fuller, the great feminist intellectual, editor of the Transcendentalist journal The Dial, was a friend of the Hawthornes who stayed with them in Concord and loved the Old Manse. Marshall lays out the case that Hester is partly Fuller. There is the [radical feminist theory that Hester voices](https://www.rebindclassics.com/scarlet-letter-feminist-novel/), lifted from Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century. And there is the name of the child. "The nickname, the pearl was [a nickname for Margaret](https://www.rebindclassics.com/a-nickname-for-margaret/)," Marshall says. "That's something that's not often known." She compares it to Polly for Mary, a connection that would have been legible to readers in 1850 and has faded since. The pearl of great price from scripture and the private nickname for Margaret Fuller may be hiding in the same name. But Marshall stops short of the full identification, and her reasons are worth hearing because they show a biographer policing the line between evidence and overreach. She has read the book that presses the claim hard, Hawthorne's Fuller Mystery, which argues flatly that Hester is Fuller and that Hawthorne was in love with her, and that this is why Sophia was upset when she read the novel. "I just don't agree with that," Marshall says. The borrowing of Fuller's ideas is real. The wholesale equation of character and woman, and the romantic motive behind it, is more than the evidence will bear. Marshall takes the influence and declines the legend. ## **A Group Portrait, Not an Invention** What emerges is a novel densely populated by real lives. Marshall also hears the Hawthorne women in Hester's very silhouette, the dark-haired, tall, brilliant, somewhat reclusive figures who recur across all his novels and may trace back to his own sister Elizabeth, "a powerful influence on Nathaniel and brilliant." The strong women of his family, his mother and his reclusive sister, stand behind the heroine alongside the Peabodys and Fuller. This is what a biographer brings to a novel that other readers cannot. Marshall does not treat Hester as a pure invention floating free of history. She reads the character as a composite assembled from women Hawthorne actually knew, loved, married, and admired, their imaginations and arguments and even their nicknames stitched into the fiction. Sophia's painter's eye in the imagery. Elizabeth's anti-Calvinist mission in Pearl. Fuller's feminism in Hester's voice and possibly her name. The Scarlet Letter is a novel, but for Marshall it is also a group portrait, and she has spent her life learning to recognize the faces.