A is a scarlet letter: 'Hester' brings color and magic to Hawthorne’s Salem

"Hester" by Laurie Lico Albanese had me dusting off my 19th Century American Lit knowledge, but the author said readers do not have to be familiar with Nathaniel Hawthorne or his seminal work, “The Scarlet Letter,” to appreciate her new novel.

Albanese said the only thing you need to know is that “The Scarlet Letter” takes place in the 1600s at the height of Puritan culture in Massachusetts. The protagonist, Hester Prynne, has a child out of wedlock and is ostracized from town, forced to wear an embroidered red “A” on her dress for “adulterer.”

“'The Scarlet Letter' is America's first historical novel, and Hester Prynne is America's first feminist heroine,” Albanese said. “I knew that Hester was a really interesting character and we've never heard from her directly. So that's the reason for this book. Let's hear Hester tell her own story.”

Rather than rewrite the original novel with a new narrator, Albanese opted to set her book in Salem in 1829, about 20 years before Hawthorne published his novel. Albanese will talk about her book at the Texas Book Festival.

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“Hester” tells the story of Isobel, who immigrates to the U.S. from Scotland with plenty of secrets. Albanese said she decided to center her novel on the character Isobel because historians and literary scholars have long speculated that Hester might be a character based on a real woman Hawthorne knew.

“All Hawthorne’s other novels have an identifiable, autobiographical seed, and only ‘The Scarlet Letter’ can't be traced to his known autobiographical story. So why is that?” she said. “I decided to make Hawthorne's Hester a woman that he knew. I decided to make it that he modeled his Hester upon a portion of his own life.”

Like Hester Prynne, Isobel is a talented embroiderer who is able to make a living with her needle despite difficult circumstances. Isobel’s talent with designs stems from a phenomenon called synesthesia, which affects less than 10% of the world’s population. People with synesthesia experience multiple sensory responses when only one sense has been stimulated.

In Isobel’s case, she sees letters as different colors. As she tells her mother when she starts to learn the alphabet: “A is a scarlet letter.” Isobel’s mother, wary of accusations of witchcraft that have plagued their family in past generations, tells Isobel she must never share her colors with anyone.

When Isobel arrives in the New World she promptly encounters Nathaniel Hathorne (pre-name change). Nat, as Isobel calls him, is an aspiring writer from a prominent local family who keeps to himself and wanders through town at all hours. And so the daughter of an accused Scottish witch grows increasingly intrigued by a man whose ancestors perpetrated some of the worst violence of the Salem witch trials.

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“I was really interested in this idea that people from polar opposite backgrounds, meaning a man descended from a judge at the Salem witch trials, and a woman descended from someone accused of witchcraft, could come together — and what would that mean?” she said. “What kind of dark tendrils would there be that they are perhaps not even aware of themselves?”

Ultimately, Albanese said the book is about empowerment, and what happens when those who have historically been without power and freedom try to reclaim it for themselves. It touches on the struggle Black Americans faced trying to establish free lives in the antebellum north, and the prejudice that plagued new immigrants on American shores. It is also a cautionary tale about what happens when women tangle with powerful men.

And given the fate that so often befell women throughout history who asserted their power, Albanese does not tip her hand one way or the other as to the existence of witchcraft in this novel.

“One of the things I was playing around with is, what's real?” she said. “This book takes a nonbinary look at, what is magic? What is power? What are female powers, or just human powers? I think the book very clearly says that there are things that we cannot see and may not seem logical, but are there for those who want to go there. They can be found.”

Laurie Lico Albanese at Texas Book Festival

Laurie Lico Albanese will discuss “Hester” twice at the fest:

1 p.m. Saturday on a panel called the Fictitious and the Real: Characters Based on Historical Figures with writers Louis Bayard ("Jackie & Me: A Novel") and David Wright Faladé ("Black Cloud Rising")

12:30 p.m. Sunday on a panel called Strange Talents, Extraordinary Gifts in Historical Fiction with writer Rita Woods ("The Last Dreamwalker")

See the festival’s full schedule at www.texasbookfestival.org.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Laurie Albanese's tells the story of 'Hester' from a new angle