Sophia Peabody to Nathaniel Hawthorne
    The letter printed here was written during the long courtship of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody.
    Nathaniel first met Sophia at her home in Salem, Massachusetts, in November 1837. He was a writer of 33. She was 28, a semi-invalid with a talent for painting. The two families were neighbors in Salem, where an ancestor of Nathaniel's John Hathorne (Nathaniel added the "w" in Hawthorne) had been a judge in the witchcraft trials of 1692. Sophia's sister, Elizabeth, first invited the reclusive Nathaniel and his sisters to visit. In the biography by Edwin Haviland Miller, Salem Is My Dwelling Place, she reported to have said to her sister:

"O Sophia, you must get up and dress and come down. The Hawthornes are here and you never saw anything so splendid--he is handsomer than Lord Byron."
Even with such an introduction, or perhaps because of it, Sophia stayed upstairs in her bedroom while handsome Nathaniel with

"something of the hawk eye about him,"
visited downstairs. When, on a later visit, Sophia did venture downstairs, Nathaniel invited her to call on his sister one evening. Sophia, who was a victim of almost daily headaches that kept her indoors, said she never went out in the evenings.

"I wish you would,"
Hawthorne replied.
    From this beginning, friendship slowly developed into love. But if they were to get married. Hawthorne needed more money than he was likely to earn by writing. Sophia's sister, Elizabeth, wrote letters to various influential people on his behalf, and in November 1838 he was appointed to the Boston Custom House. This gave him a reasonable salary. Meanwhile, Nathaniel and Sophie exchanged warm and intimate letters. Nathaniel wrote to Sophia:

"You only have revealed me to myself, for without your aid my best knowledge of myself would have been merely to know my own shadow--to watch it flickering on the wall, and mistake its fantasies for my own real actions. Do you comprehend what you have done for me?"
    They became secretly engaged in about April 1839. Sophia's letter, printed here, was written at the end of that year. Both sensible and hopeful, she shared with him her inclination to link ordinary things and events--such as the matches ("allumettes") and country walk mentioned in the letter--with the eternal.
    Finding the money to marry, however, remained a problem. Nathaniel invested his Boston earnings in a back-to-the-soil utopian scheme at Brook Farm, West Roxbury, Massachusetts, an agricultural cooperative run in accordance with the ideas of the French social reformer, Charles Fourier. But the experiment failed and he lost his money. Nevertheless, Sophia and Nathaniel decided they would not wait any longer. They married on July 9, 1842. For the next three and a half years they lived in the Old Manse at Concord, in what was probably the most idyllic time of their 22 year marriage. In his diary, the American Notebooks, he wrote:

"We seem to have been translated to the other state of being, without having passed through death."
They lived on what they grew in the garden, and savored one another's company and the quiet of the country. Hawthorne wrote:

"It is usually supposed that the cares of life come with matrimony but I seem to have cast off all cares...My chief anxiety consists in watching the prosperity of my vegetables."
It was during this time that Hawthorne wrote his novel Mosses from an Old Manse. In March 1844, their first child, Una, was born, and Nathaniel welcomed the new responsibility:

"I have business on earth now, and must look about me for the means of doing it."
The Hawthrones moved back to Salem from Boston in 1845, then to Lenox in 1850. Two more children arrived: Julian in 1846 and Rose in 1851. Sophia delighted in the children, while Nathaniel--a loving and playful father--maintained his edge of humor.

"The children...seem very good and beautiful at this distance,"
he wrote one time from New York.
    Hawthorne's triumph as a writer came in 1849 when, after six months' intensive work, he completed The Scarlet Letter, an exploration of tragic love in the harsh Puritan New England past. When he read it to Sophia, his voice breaking with emotion,

"It broke her heart and sent her to bed with a grievous headaches, which I look upon as a triumphant success."
    After writing a biography of his friend Franklin Pierce, who became president in 1852, Nathaniel was given a consulship in Liverpool, England, where the family lived from 1853 to 1860. With their financial difficulties greatly reduced, the family continued to thrive. On a visit to Italy 10 years later, the children's governess, Ada Shepard, described it as,

"the happiest home-circle I have ever seen."
    Hawthorne died in 1864, after a life made full by his years with Sophia, who wrote:

"God has turned for me the silver lining and for me the darkest cloud has broken into ten thousand singing birds."
The marriage of Nathaniel and Sophia has been described as "a classic of American marital idylls." In spite of financial hardship and other difficulties, their delight in one another never faded. They shared a spiritual outlook on life, and perhaps this, above all, accounts for the deep joy they brought each other during their long marriage.





Text from
Famous Love Letters
Messages of Intimacy and Passion
Edited by Ronald Tamplin