All Formats & Editions

A superb depiction of a utopian community that cannot survive the individual passions of its members. In language that is suggestive and often erotic, Nathaniel Hawthorne tells a tale of failed possibilities and multiple personal betrayals as he explores the contrasts between... Read Full Overview

The Blithedale Romance is a classic story by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne's own experience as a member of the famous Brook Farm Community, which the author describes in his preface as the "most romantic episode" in his life, The Blithedale Romanceis one of the most engaging and complex of Hawthorne's novels. Recounting... Read Full Overview

The story takes place primarily in the utopian community of Blithedale, presumably in the mid-1800s. The main character, Miles Coverdale, embarks on a quest for the betterment of the world through the agrarian lifestyle and community of the Blithedale Farm. The story begins with... Read Full Overview

The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne is an intense psychological novel set in a utopian commune in the 1840s. Miles Coverdale, a young journalist, joins the utopian commune of Blithedale, where he meets a diverse group of characters including the enigmatic Priscilla,... Read Full Overview

The Blithedale Romance (+Biography and Bibliography) (Glossy Cover Finish): The principal setting is a communal farm called Blithedale (i.e., "Happy Valley"), a would-be modern Arcadia along the lines of the anti-capitalist ideals of Charles Fourier, yet is nonetheless destroyed... Read Full Overview

This Norton Critical Edition of The Blithedale Romance is based on the Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, widely considered the best available edition. It is accompanied by explanatory annotations to help readers with Hawthorne's many historical and literary... Read Full Overview

Abjuring the city for a pastoral life, a group of utopians set out to reform a dissipated America. But the group is a powerful mix of competing ambitions and its idealism finds little satisfaction in farmwork. Instead, of changing the world, the members of the Blithedale community... Read Full Overview

A group of Utopians, dispirited by a mid-19th-century America they view as dissolute, takes to the pastoral life, but finds little satisfaction in its socialist living experiments. Little by little, the members' hypocrisies, contradictions, and ideological and economic paradoxes... Read Full Overview

The selection of "Backgrounds and Sources" focuses on Hawthorne's visit to Brook Farm in 1841, as reported in his letters and The American Notebooks, as well as on other experiences and observations which find expression in the novel.

The essays in "Criticism" include... Read Full Overview

A superb depiction of a utopian community that cannot survive the individual passions of its members. In language that is suggestive and often erotic, Nathaniel Hawthorne tells a tale of failed possibilities and multiple personal betrayals as he explores the contrasts between... Read Full Overview

The Blithedale Romance , considered one of Hawthorne's major novels, explores the limitations of human nature set against an experiment in communal living. From mesmerism to illicit love, The Blithedale Romance represents one of Hawthorne's best and most sharply etched works,... Read Full Overview

First published in 1852, "The Blithedale Romance" is the third of Nathaniel Hawthorne's romantic novels. Set in the utopian communal farm called Blithedale in the 1840's, the novel tells the story of four inhabitants of the commune: Hollingsworth, a misogynist philanthropist... Read Full Overview

Written in one of the most productive periods of his career, Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance was published in 1852, a year after The House of the Seven Gables and two years after his masterpiece The Scarlet Letter. With The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne writes fully in his own... Read Full Overview

Depiction of a utopian community that cannot survive the individual passions of its members.

The Blithedale Romance, considered one of Hawthorne's major novels, explores the limitations of human nature set against... Read Full Overview

One of Nathaniel Hawthorne 's great romances, The Blithedale Romance draws upon the author's experiences at Brook Farm, the short-lived utopian community where Hawthorne spent much of 1841. Blithedale ("Happy Valley"), another would-be modern Arcadia, is the stage for Hawthorne's... Read Full Overview

There can hardly remain for me (who am really getting to be a frosty bachelor, with another white hair, every week or so, in my mustache), there can hardly flicker up again so cheery a blaze upon the hearth, as that which I remember, the next day, at Blithedale. It was a wood... Read Full Overview

A group of Utopians, unhappy with dissolute, mid-19th-century America, takes to the pastoral life; but the members find little satisfaction in the communal life. Instead of changing the world, they pursue self-centered paths that ultimately lead to tragedy. Absorbing 1852 novel... Read Full Overview