New edition of The House of the Seven Gables

The recent Signet Classics edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables features a new introduction by Marblehead's Katherine Howe, friend of the NSLT and author of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane. Not bad double-billing, Kate!

As she points out, one of Hawthorne's more notable, irascible comments is something he wrote to his publisher in 1855, "America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash..." Sorry Nate, there's no stopping the scribblers.

Brenda Wineapple, author of Hawthorne: A Life, contributes a new afterward as well. (Her more recent book, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, has been on my impossibly long to-read list for the last year.)

Catching up with my RSS feeds

• Forgot to add this to my recent post about literary-themed movies: Kill Your Darlings is about the 1944 murder of David Kammerer by Lucien Carr, which this article says "helped spawn the Beat generation." Chris Evans will star as Lowell native Jack Kerouac. It's set to come out next year.
  
  
• Maine senator Olympia Snowe is promoting legislation that could lead to the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Brunswick becoming part of the National Parks system. The house, where Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin just before moving to Andover, is currently on the National Register of Historic Places, but it's owned by Bowdoin College and was a dormitory at least as recently as 2003. (Andover's Stowe house is also a dorm for Phillips Academy.)
  
  
• This article traces the origins of the North Shore Children's Hospital. Lydia Pinkham's daughter Aroline Gove was a supporter of what was then called the North Shore Babies' Hospital, as was the Salem journalist Kate Tannant Woods. Gove also founded the Lydia E. Pinkham Memorial Clinic, still in operation as a women's clinic at 250 Derby Street in Salem.
  
  
• Happened across D. H. Lawrence's description of Nathaniel Hawthorne as a romanticist, in Studies in Classic American Literature: "And what’s a romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything As You Like It, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose and it’s always daisy-time… Hawthorne obviously isn’t this kind of romanticist." (via Bookslut)
  
  
• A sonnet by mystical, Shakespeare-obsessed, "divinely inspired" poet Jones Very: "To the Canary Bird"
  
  
• A brief round-up of excerpts from sailor's journals, including Salem's Nathaniel Bowditch, whose book The American Practical Navigator was written in 1802 and is still standard issue aboard all Naval vessels.
  
  
• In his blog about Lowell culture and politics, Richard Howe points to a NYT review of Elinor Lipman's novel The Family Man and mentions that Lipman is a member of the Lowell High School Alumni Hall of Fame.

North Shore writers on film, sort of

I posted a while ago that ABC is adapting John Updike's Witches of Eastwick as a TV series.

Earlier this spring news was released that Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter is being adapted into a teen comedy called Easy A starring Emma Stone as a

high school student who pretends to be the school slut, hoping to benefit from the publicity. Which is sort of, but actually not really at all, like the ordeal endured by Hawthorne’s heroine, Nester Prynne. (Empire Movie News; Nester is their typo, or maybe the artistic license of the screenwriters?)

Sounds terrible, but other literary classics have inspired a few good movies in that genre, if you're the kind of person who thinks any teen movie could be good. Clueless drew on Austen's Emma, Ten Things I Hate about You was a re-working of Taming of the Shrew, and She's All That was based on Pygmalion. So who knows? Easy A is shooting now.

This morning I caught a story about summer movies, and one called Fireflies in the Garden starring Julia Roberts and Willem Dafoe, named after the Robert Frost poem. Some articles describe the movie, about a dysfunctional family dealing with unexpected tragedy, as being based on or an adaptation of the poem. The Internet Movie Database even gives Frost a writing credit. Here's the 1928 poem in its entirety.

Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,

And here on earth come emulating flies,

That though they never equal stars in size,

(And they were never really stars at heart)

Achieve at times a very star-like start.

Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.

Hard to hang a 2-hour film on that, but it's an evocative jumping-off point. Fireflies in the Garden is scheduled to be released in the U.S. on June 26.

Lunch break reading: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Another gothic short story, this week by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Rappaccini's Daughter (full text on a single page) was written in 1844 when the Hawthorne family was living in Concord. It was published in the 1846 volume Mosses from an Old Manse.

A mad botanist, his poisonous hothouse flower of a daughter, and her smitten suitor do battle in this tale set in Padua, Italy, in some distant past. As he wrote in the preface to his 1860 novel The Marble Faun, also set in Italy, "actualities would not be so insisted on, as they are, and must needs be, in America." The romantic and only somewhat authentic setting freed him from the confines of realism.

For similar themes, try the political drama The Mudra-Rakshasa (The Minister's Signet) by ninth-century Indian poet Vishakadatta or the 1622 philosophical text The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton. Poet Octavio Paz translated Hawthorne's story as La Hija de Rappaccini in his only play, first produced in 1956; Mexican composer Daniel Catán transformed Paz's work into an opera in 1994.

Less highbrow homages include the recent Marvel Comics villian Monica Rappaccini, who studied biochemistry at the University of Padua before becoming an environmental terrorist who uses her own poison-suffused daughter as a biological weapon. Monica first appeared in a 2005 issue of Amazing Fantasy.

Elaine Showalter's "A Jury of Her Peers"

A few North Shore literary figures show up in Elaine Showalter's recent history of American women of letters, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx.

This L.A. Times review by Susan Salter Reynolds mentions Bradstreet:

"The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America" is a collection of poems describing the difficulties and joys of being a settler, wife and mother. It was published in London and required no fewer than 11 testimonials by male friends, family and critics to convince the publisher that it was indeed written by a woman and worthy of publication.

Harriet Beecher Stowe is quoted:

Nothing but deadly determination enables me to ever write—it is rowing against wind and tide.

As is Nathaniel Hawthorne (whose least flattering anecdotes make him sound like a prickly chauvinist):

Ink-stained women are, without a single exception, detestable.

The book comes out in late February. Looking forward to it.

“Dearest Dove: The Courtship of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne”

Literary lovers can celebrate Valentine's Day at the House of the Seven Gables with theater, a cappella, and a string quartet. Marblehead's Anne Lucas performs her specially commissioned piece, “Dearest Dove: The Courtship of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne,” based on the couple's love letters. A cappella group The Noteworthies from St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church and Salem High School's string ensemble The Quintessential Quartet follow.

Saturday, February 14, 5-7 pm
House of the Seven Gables, Derby Street, Salem
Tickets $15 members, $20 nonmembers
Call Heidi Webb at 978-744-0991, ext. 104, for tickets.
More details at the Salem Gazette's event calendar

Sophia's portrait from the House of the Seven Gables.
Nathaniel's portrait from the Peabody Essex Museum.