The Scarlet Letter By Nathaniel Hawthorne

A powerful study of bigotry, persecution, obsession and hypocrisy in early American society, the "Penguin Classics" edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter contains an introduction by Nina Baym and notes by Thomas E. Connolly.

Set in the harsh Puritan community of seventeenth-century Boston, "The Scarlet Letter" is the story of Hester Prynne, a married woman who has an affair and gives birth to an illegitimate daughter. Condemned by society for her adultery, she is forced to wear a scarlet A for 'Adulteress' on her dress for the rest of her life. Publicly disgraced and ostracised, Hester refuses to name her lover - drawing on her strength and certainty of spirit to emerge as the first true heroine of American fiction.

Hester bears her shame with dignity, and attitudes towards her soften as time passes; Arthur Dimmesdale, her lover, is steadily consumed by his guilt, having disavowed his passion for Hester and any love for their daughter Pearl, while her husband is destroyed by his determination to discover the lover's identity.