In the Library
The Blithedale Romance
Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1852
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 5.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 30
- Length
- Length 76k words
£1.99
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Tell him he has murdered me! Tell him that I'll haunt him!
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About the book
A dozen well-meaning Bostonians go out to a farm in an April snowstorm to abolish the old world and begin a better one, and the first thing they learn is how heavy hay is. Miles Coverdale, a minor poet, tells the story, and he is why it still stings: he builds himself a hiding place in a pine tree and watches his friends instead of loving them. What he watches is Zenobia, rich and dark and gorgeously alive, wearing a hothouse flower in her hair and far too large for any room the century will offer her; Hollingsworth, a reformer ground down to a single purpose who can no longer feel anything that purpose cannot use; and a pale, silent girl exhibited to paying audiences under a veil. Hawthorne had lived at Brook Farm. He knows exactly how private appetite gets in under the banner, and what it costs a woman whose only armour is pride. The last line is a confession the narrator has withheld all book, and it rearranges every page behind it.