The marriage of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne—for their contemporaries a model of true love and married happiness—was also a scene of revulsion and combat. T. Walter Herbert reveals the tragic conflicts beneath the Hawthorne's ideal of domestic fulfillment and shows how their marriage reflected the tensions within nineteenth-century society. In so doing, he sheds new light on Hawthorne's fiction, with its obsessive themes of guilt and grief, balked feminism and homosexual seduction, adultery, patricide, and incest.

T. Walter Herbert is University Scholar and Brown Professor of English at Southwestern University. He is the author of Moby-Dick and Calvinism: A World Dismantled (1977) and Marquesan Encounters: Melville and the Meaning of Civilization (1980).

"This boldly speculative psychobiography is a distinct contribution to our understanding not only of the writer but also of the social process of character formation in Hawthorne's day. Herbert's analysis also compels a significant adjustment of our view of Hawthorne's familiar long masterpieces."—The New England Quarterly

"Provocative. . . . Herbert scours the couple's private writings with the eye of an ace sleuth. . . . An intriguing probe of possibly the darker side of the Hawthorne's marriage."—New York Times Book Review

"Stunning. . . . Herbert artfully links his psychobiographical reading of the Hawthorne family to analyses of his four romances."—Bell Gale Chevigny, The Nation

"The family secrets that are revealed in Dearest Beloved are disturbing and even frightening, and a kind of dread pervades the otherwise cool literary analysis. . . . [Herbert] writes about the Hawthorne family with candor and vigor, and he brings a fresh allure to books that many readers encountered only on a required reading list. And if the reader is sent back to the bookshelf in search of The Scarlet Letter or The House of the Seven Gables, these mossy old books will take on new, urgent and even dangerous meanings."—Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"A stimulating and important book that helps us better understand the social construction of gender in nineteenth-century America."—Joan D. Hedrick, Women's Review of Books