THE SCARLET LETTER FREE
The hunters were permitted by law to pursue their human prey even in the supposedly free North.) (One of the novel’s surprising subplots involves efforts to outfox bounty hunters on the trail of enslaved people who had escaped. Albanese’s consideration of inherited guilt also encompasses questions about culpability for forebears’ enrichment through slave trade and labor. The book explores the weight of family history as Isobel and Nat each grapple with an ancestor’s role in the witch trials, one accused, the other an unrepentant prosecutor. Set in 19th-century Glasgow, Scotland, and Salem, Massachusetts – with flashbacks to 17th-century witch hunts in both places – “Hester” is a chronicle of ill-fated passion and female persecution. She announces boldly at the start of her tale: “The true story of how he found his scarlet letter – and then made it larger than life – begins when I was a child in Scotland and he was a fatherless boy writing poetry that yearned and mourned.” Soon after she immigrates to America, Isobel falls hard for the handsome, haunted, aspiring writer Nat Hathorne (the “w” in his last name was added later). “Hester” is told from the point of a view of Isobel McAllister Gamble, a young Scottish woman stuck in an unfortunate marriage.
Her new novel is colorful, in more ways than one. Ever wonder if a real woman might have inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne? On rereading “The Scarlet Letter” as an adult, novelist Laurie Lico Albanese was so taken with its heroine, “who defies powerful men and vengeful villagers by wearing the symbol of her shame like a badge of courage,” that she fabricated a backstory behind the classic.
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