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Article: Hawthorne and the "Scribbling Women": publishing The Scarlet Letter in the nineteenth-century United States.
- Article from:
- Studies in American Fiction
- Article date:
- March 22, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Northeastern University. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Besides, America is now wholly given over to a d--d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash--and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed. What is the mystery of these innumerable editions of the Lamplighter, and other books neither better nor worse?--worse they could not be, and better they need not be, when they sell by 100,000.
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It may well be that no single passage written by Nathaniel Hawthorne is better known than this or, at least over the past few decades, more widely quoted. (1) An extraordinary possibility, especially as the passage comes from the middle ...