A brother and sister occupy their family home, which has been linked to a series of unfortune events including the death of its original owner. They attempt to avoid their ancestor’s fate and escape their looming legacy. Hepzibah and Clifford Pyncheon live in a historic manor that has been in their family for generations. The property was built in the seventeenth century on stolen land that originally belonged to Matthew Maule. He was targeted, detained and eventually executed after being suspected of witchcraft. The legend claims Maule cursed the Pyncheon family, leading to a string of unexplained events starting with the death of the home’s new owner. In the present, Hepzibah and Clifford are struggling with their financial, mental and emotional burdens. The House of the Seven Gables is a rich and haunting tale set in Hawthorne’s native New England. It’s a multigenerational story that thrives on mystery, suspense and elements of Gothic horror. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of The House of Seven Gables is both modern and readable.
A brother and sister occupy their family home, which has been linked to a series of unfortune events including the death of its original owner. They attempt to avoid their ancestor’s fate and escape their looming legacy. Hepzibah and Clifford Pyncheon live in a historic manor that has been in their family for generations. The property was built in the seventeenth century on stolen land that originally belonged to Matthew Maule. He was targeted, detained and eventually executed after being suspected of witchcraft. The legend claims Maule cursed the Pyncheon family, leading to a string of unexplained events starting with the death of the home’s new owner. In the present, Hepzibah and Clifford are struggling with their financial, mental and emotional burdens. The House of the Seven Gables is a rich and haunting tale set in Hawthorne’s native New England. It’s a multigenerational story that thrives on mystery, suspense and elements of Gothic horror. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of The House of Seven Gables is both modern and readable.
This is the extended annotated edition including a rare and extensive biographical essay on the author, as well as an introductory to the book written by George Parsons Lathrop. This book, which the author himself preferred to his previous novel, is of quieter tone than "The Scarlet Letter." It is more minutely elaborated, and its pathos depends more on the peculiar temperaments of its characters. The scene is laid in Salem, and the house, which much efiort has been made to identify, corresponds in many points to an old dwelling formerly standing there, known as the Curwen House, and sometimes called "the old witch-house." Engravings from a picture of it are used as illustrations of the book. Some points in the story corresponding to the history of the Hawthornes were noted in the beginning of this sketch. The character of Clifford and the problem of his strange destiny, the mockery of fate, which, having adapted him so delicately to an existence of sensuous refinement, stripped him in his youth, at one brutal stroke, of everything fair in life, and threw him among the lowest and coarsest surroundings, is the great study of the book. Its pervading thought is the theory of inheritance, the repetition of an original type now and then down a family line, and the curse of wrong-doing, blasting innocent lives when wronger and wronged are dust. The characters of Hepzibah and Phoebe are beautiful types, strongly contrasted on the surface, but having at bottom an intimate kinship in moral uprightness and capacity for devotion. That of Judge Pyncheon also is exquisitely worked out in the subtle self-deception of the hypocrite, -no character being so great a favorite in fiction, and none so often badly drawn, as that of the hypocrite, because it looks so much more easy and uncomplicated than it is.
IIn a sleepy little New England village stands a dark, weather-beaten, many-gabled house. This brooding mansion is haunted by a centuries-old curse that casts the shadow of ancestral sin upon the last four members of the distinctive Pyncheon family. Mysterious deaths threaten the living. Musty documents nestle behind hidden panels carrying the secret of the family's salvation-or its downfall.
In a sleepy little New England village stands a dark, weather-beaten, many-gabled house. This brooding mansion is haunted by a centuries-old curse that casts the shadow of ancestral sin upon the last four members of the distinctive Pyncheon family. Mysterious deaths threaten the living. Musty documents nestle behind hidden panels carrying the secret of the family's salvation-or its downfall. Hawthorne called The House of the Seven Gables "a Romance," and freely bestowed upon it many fascinating gothic touches. A brilliant intertwining of the popular, the symbolic, and the historical, the novel is a powerful exploration of personal and national guilt, a work that Henry James declared "the closest approach we are likely to have to the Great American Novel."
