The marriage of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne-for their contemporaries a model of true love and married happiness-was also a scene of revulsion and combat. T. Walter Herbert reveals the tragic conflicts beneath the Hawthorne's ideal of domestic fulfillment and shows how their marriage reflected the tensions within nineteenth-century society. In so doing, he sheds new light on Hawthorne's fiction, with its obsessive themes of guilt and grief, balked feminism and homosexual seduction, adultery, patricide, and incest. | Dearest Beloved by T. Walter Herbert, Paperback | Indigo Chapters