SOURCE: Herbert, T. Walter. “The Queen of All She Surveys.” In Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-Class Family, pp. 37-58. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

In the following essay, Herbert analyzes the inner fears and sadness of Hawthorne's early life and summarizes her spiritual and social thought.

Sophia Hawthorne is the most vilified wife in American literary history, after having been in her own time the most admired. Elizabeth Shaw Melville has been blamed for not having measured up to Fayaway, and although Lidian Emerson was eminently presentable, like her short-lived predecessor, Ellen Louisa Tucker, neither woman is credited with having a vital relation to her husband's imagination. Thoreau, Whitman, and James did not marry, and Henry Adams's wife, Clover Hooper, is omitted—a gasping silence—from the story of his education. Sophia Hawthorne, by contrast, was hailed as indispensable to the flowering of...