Mr. Prynne

Since Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850, millions of readers have been swept up into Hester Prynne's story of sin, solitude, penance, and punishment. Now, in the pages of Mr. Prynne, J. A. Gray re-tells the story from a new perspective-that of Hester's long-lost husband.

Readers will remember the opening scene: The newly recovered Prynne arrives, at last, in Puritan Boston, and there discovers a jeering crowd gathered before a platform on which his young wife, the beautiful Hester, is on display as a convicted adulteress-with a baby in her arms and a large red A on her bosom. When a busybody asks about his identity, Prynne assumes the name of Roger Chillingworth, and begins, in secret, his search for the man who both used his wife and abandoned her and her child.

Hawthorne warned his publisher, shortly before The Scarlet Letter was released, that the story was "dark and dismal." And so it is. He set his fiction in 1642, in a new little harbor town, a Christian community, which Hawthorne the artist found to be troubled by sin and guilt and secrets, about which he writes feelingly. But in this embryonic city of Boston there are also human strivings that are neither dark nor dismal: there is love, loyalty, and insight; responsibility, charity, and child-rearing. Then, finally, there is healing. 

In Mr. Prynne, the Bostonians of 1642 take on new life with new characters joining them, new scenes unrolling, and hidden things being revealed.