Dearest Beloved The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-Class Family

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.Herbert, T. Walter is the author of 'Dearest Beloved The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-Class Family' with ISBN 9780520201552 and ISBN 0520201558.