SOURCE: Hall, Julie E. “‘Coming to Europe,’ Coming to Authorship: Sophia Hawthorne and Her Notes in England and Italy.” Legacy 19, no. 2 (2002): 137-51.

In the following essay, Hall portrays Hawthorne's transformation from amanuensis and editor for her husband to professional writer as the author of Notes in England and Italy.

With the publication of Notes in England and Italy, a volume based on letters and journals she wrote while the Hawthorne family lived abroad from 1853 to 1860, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne for the first and last time in her life put herself “into a pair of book covers,” as she once described it, and presented herself before the public gaze as an author. Although the nineteenth century was fairly afloat in travel literature, with Italy “taking the lead in eliciting memoirs” (Buzard 159), Hawthorne's Notes made a place for itself in the crowded market. Appearing serially in Putnam's Magazine in 1869 and then...