The Scarlet Letter (Classics of World Literature)

xlviii, 302 pp. An elderly English scholar sends his young wife, Hester Prynne, to set up their home in the Puritan Boston of the mid-seventeenth century. When he arrives two years later he discovers Hester in the pillory, cradling her illegitimate child in her arms. Refusing to name her lover, she is sentenced to wear a scarlet A, signifying Adulteress, as a token of her sin. Desperate for revenge, her husband assumes a new name, and in the guise of a doctor begins a cruel and ultimately destructive search for the father of her child.