From Witchery to Sanctity: The Religious Vicissitudes of the Hawthornes

Más información sobre el libro

"Although Nathaniel Hawthorne, the renowned author of The Scarlet Letter, shunned organized religion, his stories were heavily weighted with sin and guilt. The history of generations of Hawthornes and their journey from Puritanism to Catholicism offers a penetrating glimpse into an extraordinary family." "The Birds, father and daughter, bring this story of the powerful forces that shaped the Hawthornes to life. We see the portrait of William Hawthorne, who arrived from England in 1630, and his son John, who became the most notorious Hawthorne in his efforts to battle the devil by stamping out witchcraft in the infamous Salem witchcraft trials. As a judge, overseeing public morality, John also had Quakers assaulted, arrested, and sent to trial. When one couple could not pay a fine, he had their two children sold into slavery." "Such inhumanity became the subject of Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction two centuries later. In his introduction to The Scarlet Letter, he avers to his seventeenth-century ancestors as bitter persecutors." "But if Nathaniel could win no solace from religion, his daughter, Rose, found peace becoming a Catholic nun, and she founded a women's religious order, The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, which to this day is dedicated to working with the sick and dying. Rose said that the strongest influence on his life was her father and the sympathy he had consistently showed for those in poverty and disease."--Jacket