Sophia Amelia Peabody Hawthorne, known to many as the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne, was an artist, an intellectual, a lifelong writer of letters and journals, and, late in her life, a published author. Nathaniel Hawthorne once called her the "queen of journalizers" and wrote to his friend and publisher James T. Fields on 28 November 1859 that he had "never read anything so good as some of her narrative and descriptive epistles to her friends." To Fields's partner William D. Ticknor, Hawthorne wrote on 5 June 1857, "her descriptions are the most perfect pictures that were ever put on paper." Yet, recognition from the scholars has been long in coming for Sophia Hawthorne. Early studies of her husband's life and fiction depicted her as the quintessential Victorian female--subservient, prudish, weak, and invalidic--and the characterization has proved so strong that even modern biographers and scholars have difficulty escaping it. Such negative characterizations of...