SOURCE: Woodson, Thomas, James A. Rubino, and Jamie Barlow Kayes. “With Hawthorne in Wartime Concord: Sophia Hawthorne's 1862 Diary.” Studies in the American Renaissance (1988): 281-84.

In the following excerpt, Woodson, Rubino, and Kayes consider the background to Hawthorne's journal of 1862.

In addition to her considerable correspondence, Sophia Hawthorne left behind several notebooks, journals, and diaries—documents that will allow scholars to follow the incidents of her life in much more consistent detail than can be done for her husband's. He often tried to efface documents of a merely biographical interest, allowing survival much more frequently to notebooks that retained the value of providing brief, generalized subjects or incidents for stories than to anything that savored of the autobiographical or confessional.

During her last years she made use of the format of the Pocket Diary, apparently following Nathaniel's lead. In England in 1856 he had kept such a record, giving a...