Fanshawe
1828
Hawthorne wrote Fanshawe as an undergraduate at Bowdoin, then spent decades trying to bury it. The shame he felt over this early effort is partly what drove him toward the masterworks that followed. Yet Fanshawe reveals the young Hawthorne already commanding his signature elements: the isolated scholar haunted by passion, the forbidden love, the shadowed corridors of New England institutions where ambition curdles into obsession. The novel centers on Fanshawe, a brilliant and ascetic student at the struggling Harley College, who falls desperately in love with Ellen Langton, the beautiful ward of the college president. Edward Walcott, a fellow student, also desires her, and the triangle that forms drives the narrative toward its tragic conclusion. What makes Fanshawe remarkable is seeing a great writer in formation. The psychological interiority, the atmospheric settings, the sense that every emotional victory carries the weight of damnation all appear here, in embryonic form. For readers curious about Hawthorne's creative origins, this is the portrait of an artist discovering his darkest preoccupations.
