The Blithedale Romance »

"Words -- so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them," Nathaniel Hawthorne once reflected. Hawthorne's own words indeed had an undeniable power. Author of The Scarlet Letter and originator of the American short story, Hawthorne left an indelible impression on literature that would influence his fellow writers into the next century.

One of Hawthorne’s great romances, The Blithedale Romance draws upon the author’s experiences at Brook Farm, the short-lived utopian community where Hawthorne spent much of 1841. Blithedale (“Happy Valley”), another would-be modern Arcadia, is the stage for Hawthorne’s grimly comic tragedy (Henry James famously called the novel “the lightest, the brightest, the liveliest” of Hawthorne’s “unhumorous fictions”). In his introduction, Robert S. Levine considers bio-graphical and historical contexts and offers a fresh appreciation of the novel’s ironic first-person narrator.

The John Harvard Library edition reproduces the authoritative text of The Blithedale Romance in The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Introduction Robert S. Levine ix

Note on the Text xxxi

Chronology of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Life xxxiii

The Blithedale Romance

Preface 1

I Old Moodie 5

II Blithedale 9

III A Knot of Dreamers 14

IV The Supper-Table 23

V Until Bedtime 32

VI Coverdale's Sick-Chamber 39

VII The Convalescent 49

VIII A Modern Arcadia 58

IX Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla 69

X A Visitor from Town 81

XI The Wood-Path 89

XII Coverdale's Hermitage 98

XIII Zenobia's Legend 106

XIV Eliot's Pulpit 117

XV A Crisis 128

XVI Leave-Takings 137

XVII The Hotel 145

XVIII The Boarding-House 153

XIX Zenobia's Drawing-Room 160

XX They Vanish 168

XXI An Old Acquaintance 174

XXII Fauntleroy 182

XXIII A Village-Hall 194

XXIV The Masqueraders 204

XXV The Three Together 213

XXVI Zenobia and Coverdale 222

XXVII Midnight 229

XXVIII Blithedale-Pasture 238

XXIX Miles Coverdale's Confession 245

Selected Bibliography 249