Download or read book Dearest Beloved written by T. Walter Herbert and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1993-02-15 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.