Hawthorne's darkest meditation on idealism and its discontents draws from his brief, unhappy tenure at Brook Farm, the utopian commune that claimed him as a founding member but expelled him for refusing to work the fields. Miles Coverdale arrives at Blithedale seeking renewal, but discovers that the project of reforming humanity collides irreducibly with the tangle of egos, jealousies, and hidden pasts that its members bring with them. Zenobia, magnetic and enigmatic, draws the men of the commune into her orbit while Hollingsworth pursues his own grand scheme under the banner of social reform. What unfolds is both a love triangle and an anatomy of utopian delusion: the poetry of aspiration meets the prose of human limitation. Hawthorne, never one to trust the romantic temperament, watches his idealists consume each other with the same hunger they profess to direct at the world's redemption. This is for readers who want their utopias poisoned, who find the dark underside of earnestness more revealing than the earnestness itself.
