The Literature Network - `Hester' Adds Flesh To `Scarlet' Heroine

`Hester' Adds Flesh To `Scarlet' Heroine

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From: Chicago Sun-Times
Date: 19951008
Author:ROGER FLAHERTY; DOLORES FLAHERTY

When Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter opens, heroine Hester Prynne is pregnant, jailed, and refusing to name her adulterous companion. The reader has to wait a bit to learn that he is the revered Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale.

Hester, a novel by Christopher Bigsby (Penguin, $11.95) provides a pre-history that tells how the lovers got together and imagines some further background for the events in Boston leading to the denouement of Hawthorne's book.

Bigsby's Hester was a village girl who went to work as a maid for the much older Roger Chillingworth, an experimenter with potions ...

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