Sophia Peabody Hawthorne

Born in 1809 into an expansive home, Sophia Peabody lived among women who provided both financial and emotional sustenance. She was a precocious, eager student, whose talent as a visual artist was cultivated by leading painters of her day: Thomas Doughty, Chester Harding, and Washington Allston. As one of America’s first professional women artists, she exhibited her paintings at the Boston Athenaeum and earned an income from her oil canvases, illustrations, decorative art, sculptures, and copies of the masters’ works.

In the early 1830s, Sophia traveled to Cuba. In more than 800 pages of letters, she described her pleasures riding horses by day and waltzing by night with a handsome suitor. Moreover, her detailed observations of the lush tropical landscape and her relationship to it constitute an early, significant contribution to transcendentalist discourse. These letters, bound in three volumes as the Cuba Journal, were widely circulated among admiring New England readers, one of whom was Nathaniel Hawthorne. He was entranced by the descriptive prowess of this “Queen of Journalizers,” as he dubbed her, and was drawn to a woman so very different from all he had known. His childhood had been spent in a reclusive family, and he had been a reluctant student whose travels had been circumscribed and unadventurous. And he had masked his identity as a fledgling author behind anonymity.

Valenti emphasizes the chasm between their experiences with parallel biographies that present Sophia, then Nathaniel, at comparable moments of their lives. Their narratives merge at their courtship and engagement, which was kept secret at Nathaniel’s insistence and prolonged for three years. Sophia believed that their wedding in 1842 was to be the union of equal artistic partners. But when Nathaniel squelched her aspirations, she transferred her creative energies to the domestic sphere. Tensions between husband and wife ignited his fiction, resulting in some of his most memorable short stories. These did not, however, earn money sufficient to pay the rent. Volume 1 concludes with Sophia’s negotiation of the Hawthornes’ eviction from the Old Manse, their removal to Salem, and the birth of their second child.