Love Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Volume 2 (of 2) — Edition Insights

A Husband's Domestic Comedy

Hawthorne's humor thrives on domestic mishaps. He reports that Miss Margaret Fuller's "transcendental heifer" is fractious and apt to kick over the milk pail, adding, "Thou knowest best, whether in these traits of character, she resembles her mistress." The joke lands because it is shared—Sophia knows Fuller, and Hawthorne trusts her to catch the allusion. Later, he describes their dog Leo under suspicion of murdering a hen, burying his booty, and walking "like a rheumatic old gentleman" after a whipping. These vignettes are not mere filler; they are the texture of a marriage conducted partly on paper. Hawthorne turns chores, pets, and visitors into shared anecdotes, building intimacy through laughter.

The Rhythm of Separation

The letters trace a pattern of absence and anticipated reunion. In June 1844, Hawthorne writes from Concord while Sophia is in Boston for medical treatment. He reassures her: "I had rather come and see thee in Boston, than that thou shouldst return too soon." Yet the restraint cracks: "Oh, how I love thee!" The letters oscillate between practical updates—boiled lamb, eels for breakfast, a plum pudding from Mrs. Prescott—and declarations of longing. This rhythm gives the collection a narrative arc: each letter is a small bridge over the gap between them. Readers watch Hawthorne manage solitude with housework and visitors, always counting the days until "our hearts will rush together."

Objects as Vessels of Affection

Hawthorne invests everyday objects with emotional weight. He lends their astral lamp to a neighbor for a wedding, noting its "trick of going out in the middle of the evening" and imagining the laughable disaster if it fails at the critical moment. The lamp becomes a token of shared memory—Sophia knows its quirks. Similarly, he reports that Miss Barret asked his permission to borrow it, but "she has a very proper idea of the authority of the wife." These small transactions reveal how the couple's domestic life is conducted through proxies: letters, borrowed lamps, and the absent wife's imagined consent. Hawthorne's attention to such details makes the material world feel charged with their partnership.

The Unregenerated Man and the Believing Husband

Hawthorne frequently splits himself into two voices: the faithful husband who trusts in spring and the "unregenerated man" who shivers and doubts. At Brook Farm, he writes, "Through faith, I persist in believing that spring and summer will come in their due season; but the unregenerated man shivers within me." This internal debate recurs throughout the letters, giving them a psychological depth beyond mere report. He is both the optimist who chose a communal experiment and the skeptic who finds himself in a snowbound parody of paradise. The letters thus become a record of self-consciousness—Hawthorne watching himself play the farmer, the milkmaid, the patient lover, and reporting back to the one person who understands the performance.

Reading these letters sequentially reveals a marriage built on shared jokes, patient waiting, and the constant translation of daily life into affectionate prose. Hawthorne's voice here is looser and more playful than in his fiction, but no less crafted. Pay attention to what he chooses to tell—and what he leaves for Sophia to infer. The gaps between letters are as telling as the words themselves.

Reading these letters, I keep noticing how Hawthorne’s love for Sophia spills into the smallest, most ordinary moments—a cabbage patch, a stubborn cow, his own foolish heart. It makes me think of that quieter address in Edinburgh, Address, delivered in Craigie Hall, Edinburgh, February 24th, 1871 — A Reader’s Guide, and how certain voices only grow warmer with distance, like old letters left on a windowsill.