This is a troubling story of crime, sin. guilt,punishment and expiation, set in the rigid moral climate of 17th century New England.The young mother of an illegitimate child confronts her Puritan judges.However, it is not so much her harsh sentence,but the cruelties of slowly exposed guilt as her lover is revealed, that hold the reader enthralled all the way to the book's poignant climax.

In 1850, when the first edition of The Scarlet Letter was published,Hawthorne was known as a writer of tales, many of them having appeared in magazines and gift annuals, though three volumes of his tales saw publication in the decade before the novel appeared: a revised edition of Twice-Told Tales was published in 1842 (and elicited Edgar Allan Poe"s famous review in Grabam"s Magazine for April 1842), The Celestial Rail-Road followed in 1843 and Mosses from an Old Manse was published in 1846. These volumes brought Hawthorne some literary notoriety, but like so many other American writers of his day he suffered from the absence of an international copyright law that would extend to American writers those advantages enjoyed by their European (especially English) contemporaries, for the American writer could not compete on his own soil with cheap editions of Scott and Dickens or reap adequate rewards from home sales in a country in which the business of publication was still in its infancy and where communications to outlying frontier towns and villages meant that sales were largely confined to a few metropolitan areas.

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTORY  The Custom-House

ONE  The Prison-Door

TWO  The Market-Place

THREE  The Recognition

FOUR  The Interview

FIVE Hester at Her Needle

SlX  Pearl

SEVEN The Governor"s Hall

EIGHT  The Elf-Child and the Minister

NINE The Leech

TEN  The Leech and His Patient

ELEVEN  The Interior of a Heart

TWELVE The Minister"s Vigil

THIRTEEN  Another View of Hester

FOURTEEN  Hester and the Physician

FIFTEEN  Hester and Pearl

SIXTEEN  A Forest Walk

SEVENTEEN  The Pastor and His Parishioner

EIGHTEEN  A Flood of Sunshine

NINETEEN  The Child at the Brook-Side

TWENTY  The Minister in a Maze

TWENTY-ONE  The New England Holiday

TWENTY-TWO  The Procession

TWENTY-THREE  The Revelation of the Scarlet Letter

TWENTY-FOUR  Conclusion

NOTES