Nathaniel Hawthorne · 1850 · exile

Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 novel, set in the Boston of the 1640s. Hester Prynne comes out of the prison with a baby and a letter stitched to her dress, and refuses for seven years to say who the father was - and the book is what that costs her, the child, the minister and the husband who has come back.

1. 1
   The prison door

   Heavy oak and iron spikes, and a wild rose bush growing beside it that Hawthorne offers to the reader as the one mercy in the chapter - and a young woman brought out into the daylight with a three-month-old child.

2. 2
   The scaffold

   At the western end of the market-place under the eaves of Boston's earliest church. She stands there three hours and will not name him, and sees in the crowd a small crooked man who is her own husband, lately thought drowned.

3. 3
   The cottage

   A thatched cottage on the edge of town by the shore, outside the settlement but within its jurisdiction - seven years of needlework for other people's weddings and funerals, and a daughter who asks unanswerable questions.

4. 4
   The Governor's hall

   Bellingham's mansion with its armour and its portraits, where the magistrates propose to take Pearl away - and Hester makes Dimmesdale argue for her, which he does, without either of them saying why he should.

5. 5
   The forest

   Outside the town's law, where she takes off the letter and lets down her hair and they make a plan to sail for England - and Pearl will not come near her until she pins it back on.

6. 6
   The scaffold

   Election Day, and the minister climbs the scaffold in front of the whole colony, opens his shirt and dies on it - and Chillingworth, with nothing left to do, shrivels up within the year and leaves Pearl his money.