¹ North American Review, 35 (July, 1837), 59–73; repr., in part, in J. Donald Crowley (ed.), Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage (London, 1970), pp. 55–9. For biographical information, see esp. Stewart (1948), Mellow (1980), Turner (1980). For his invaluable comments on an earlier version of this introduction, I am grateful to my colleague John Limon, whose own excellent contribution to the discussion of Hawthorne and The House of the Seven Gables is noted in the Select Bibliography.

² For an excellent discussion of the invention or reinvention of Hawthorne’s literary identity by Fields and others, see Richard H. Brodhead, The School of Hawthorne (New York, 1986), ch. 3, esp. pp. 54–8.

³ The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Columbus, Ohio, 1962–), ix, 3–5. All future references to this edition, cited as CE, will be provided in parentheses in the text.

⁴ Quoted in Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife: A Biography (Boston, 1884), i. 383.

⁵ Merrell R. Davis and William H. Gilman (eds.), The Letters of Herman Melville (New Haven, Conn., 1960), p. 125.

⁶ Crowley (ed.), Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage, pp. 195, 203, 220.

⁷ All parenthetical page references to The House of the Seven Gables are to the present edition.

⁸ See especially Richard Chase, The American Novel and its Tradition (Garden City, NY, 1957; repr. Baltimore, 1980). For my own comments on Hawthorne and ‘romance’, see Bell (1980) and ‘Arts of Deception: Hawthorne, “Romance,” and The Scarlet Letter’, in Michael J. Colacurcio (ed.), New Essays on The Scarlet Letter (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 29–56.

⁹ Tuckerman, ‘Nathaniel Hawthorne’, in B. Bernard Cohen (ed.), The Recognition of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Selected Criticism since 1828 (Ann Arbor, 1969), p. 60; Mayo, in Crowley (ed.), Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage, p. 224.

¹⁰ William Charvat, ‘Introduction to The House of the Seven Gables’ (CE, II, p. xx).

¹¹ Crowley (ed.), Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage, p. 224. Similarly, the anonymous reviewer in the Christian Examiner—who thought the ‘impression’ left on thereader’s mind by The House of the Seven Gables ‘much pleasanter than thatproduced by its predecessor’—wrote that in the later book ‘the artistic execution [is]less perfect’, and that the novel is ‘inferior in interest to The Scarlet Letter’ (ibid., p. 195).

¹² Charvat, ‘Introduction’ (CE, II, p. xx).

¹³ Hawthorne’s sister Louisa was the first of many readers to see in the portrait of the judge a more specific and personal attack—on Charles Wentworth Upham (1802–75), a Salem Whig who had played a leading role in Hawthorne’s dismissal from the Custom House. (See Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, i. 438.)

¹⁴ Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton, NJ, 1971). P. 5.

¹⁵ In 1838, in his notebook, Hawthorne commented on a similar resolution of a feud through marriage that had occurred in his own family. (See The American Notebooks, CE, VIII, 74–5.)