| Front | the Blithedale Romance |
|---|---|
| Back | novel Nathaniel Hawthorne 1852 based on the author's experience at the transcendentalist utopian community at brook farm the narrator , miles Coverdale, goes to the utopian community of Blithedale, where he meets the famous Zenobia, an exotic feminist, a Priscilla, a mysterious and fragile seamstress zenobia passionately loves the egotistic Hollingsworth, who wishes to turn Blithdale into an institution for criminal reform Priscilla has escaped to Blithdale from the control of the evil Westervelt who forced her to pose as the mysterious 'veiled lady' through whom he demonstrated his mesmeric powers to Boston audience. zenobia drowns herself Coverdale lapses back into a lonely bachelor's life, offering as explanation for his obsession with his three friends that he has all along been in love with Priscilla The Blithedale Romance (1852) is Nathaniel Hawthorne's third major romance. Its setting is a utopian farming commune based on Brook Farm, of which Hawthorne was a founding member and where he lived in 1841. The novel dramatizes the conflict between the commune's ideals and the members' private desires and romantic rivalries. In Hawthorne (1879), Henry James called it "the lightest, the brightest, the liveliest" of Hawthorne's "unhumorous fictions," while literary critic Richard Brodhead has described it as "the darkest of Hawthorne's novels."[1] |
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