Robuck, Erika. The House of Hawthorne. New York: Penguin, 2015.

This novel brought to life for me a world about which I have long imagined. One of my favorite family vacations included an extended stay in Concord that involved several author site visits and tours and a visit to Salem that included a tour of the house of seven gables. How I have longed since that trip to be a fly on the wall in any of those places during the heyday of the Concord writers. Robuck gives me a glimpse into the world of Nathaniel Hawthorne and his family.

So the book nerd in me was thrilled to get to meet Nathaniel Hawthorne through the eyes of his wife Sophia Peabody. I knew of his financial struggles in an academic fashion, but this novel brings to light more clearly all of the implications, from the delay in their marriage to the gypsy like way in which they lived. I appreciate the references to his works and the contexts in which they were written. I enjoy "getting to know" Emerson, Thoreau, the Alcotts, Melville, and others through their contact with the Hawthorne family. I am consistently fascinated with the idea of women novelists and artists and the sacrifices they choose to make or not make in terms of marriage and family. This book illuminates this issue through Sophia. Her mother and Margaret Fuller both urge her not to marry, but to direct all her energies to her art. She acknowledges that her art does indeed suffer in motherhood. Interestingly Hawthorne is presented as being against female writers.

Oddly enough, my only discomfort with the title was in the presentation of the intimate details of their love for each other. At times I was just a bit irritated by Sophia's seeming reverence of her husband. She was irritated with him by times; I was irritated with him more often, I guess. And I guess because I have him on a canonical pedestal as a writer, I just didn't feel comfortable with reading about the more private aspects of their marriage. The more contemporary paperback romance elements are just a bit jarring.

Overall, though, what a read for literary buffs anxious to know just a bit more about the authors we admire. Well researched and well crafted. I will be recommending to other readers!

An ARC was providèd by Penguin through Net Galley in exchange for an honest review.