Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne

In my spare time, I’ve been immersed in writings by Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne.   Sophia and Nathaniel each kept written journals, but have been known to collaborate their writing here, in a journal called “Ordinary Myseries”.

“Intended solely for their own eyes, the journal records the ordinary events & activities that occupied them as newlyweds: walks through the countryside around Concord, appraisals of their new home, encounters with neighbors (among them Emerson, Fuller, & Thoreau), descriptions of the weather & the changing seasons–all material that Hawthorne would later draw on for the preface to his second collection of tales, Mosses from an Old ManseÓ (1846). Its most persistent note, however, is the mutual expression of marital happiness.” (1)

Sophie has taken it upon herself, after the death of her husband, to translate his journal into something publishable.      During her translation, it is thought that she is able to feel him with her spiritually.  “I think he reveals himself exquisitely in these papers… I seem to … see, through his eyes, what I might not see with my own.”

Another thing that struck me was the way Nathaniel and Sophia met.

“Like Hawthorne, Sophia was a reclusive person. Throughout her early life, she had frequent migraines and underwent several experimental medical treatments.^[30] She was mostly bedridden until her sister introduced her to Hawthorne, after which her headaches seem to have abated. The Hawthornes enjoyed a long marriage, often taking walks in the park. Of his wife, who he referred to as his “Dove”, Hawthorne wrote that she “is, in the strictest sense, my sole companion; and I need no other—there is no vacancy in my mind, any more than in my heart… Thank God that I suffice for her boundless heart!”^[31] Sophia greatly admired her husband’s work. In one of her journals, she writes: “I am always so dazzled and bewildered with the richness, the depth, the… jewels of beauty in his productions that I am always looking forward to a second reading where I can ponder and muse and fully take in the miraculous wealth of thoughts”.^[

^{Two writers who obviously adored each other.}

 

(1) Google Library