In the Library
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 6 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 25
- Length
- Length 83k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
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Thomas Hardy
Hardy writes the same punishment of a woman for a sin that the men around her share and escape.
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Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky takes the same guilt and makes it the whole novel, but his sinner gets to speak.
Free in the app
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary does the same thing, watching a rigid society close in on a woman after a private transgression, though her mark is restless want rather than a public letter.
£1.99
About the book
The town means the letter as a brand. Hester Prynne, handed a scrap of cloth that marks her for life as an adulteress, takes up her needle and works it in gold thread, fantastic and gorgeous, until the badge of her shame becomes the most beautiful thing in drab Puritan Boston. That single act of defiance is the whole book in miniature. Hawthorne lets her wear the worst the magistrates can devise out in the open, year upon year, until it stops being a sentence and becomes simply hers, while the minister Arthur Dimmesdale, who shares the sin and hides it, is eaten from within by the secret he cannot speak. The wild child Pearl, born of that sin, is the one soul in town who cannot be taught to pretend. What The Scarlet Letter knows, and never stops knowing, is that a shame carried in the open can be outlived, and that the letter at last indicts not the woman who wears it but the people who pinned it on.