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The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne

AudiobooksEnglish9 h 11 min

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In the Puritan colony of Boston in the 1640s, Hester Prynne stands on the scaffold with her baby daughter Pearl, condemned to wear a scarlet letter A on her…

About the recording

Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
Read by: hefyd, librarianite, Ana Simão and 9 other readers
Length: 9:10:39
Parts: 26
Language: English
Source: LibriVox · Internet Archive

Now playingIntroductory: The Custom-House, Part 1

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Chapters (26)

About this book

In the Puritan colony of Boston in the 1640s, Hester Prynne stands on the scaffold with her baby daughter Pearl, condemned to wear a scarlet letter A on her dress for adultery, and refuses to name the child's father. Her husband, long thought lost at sea, arrives in the town under a false name and sets out to discover the man, while the respected young minister Arthur Dimmesdale is slowly consumed by a hidden guilt.

Context and significance

Nathaniel Hawthorne, descended from a judge of the Salem witch trials, published the novel in 1850, and it is a classic study of sin, shame and hypocrisy. Twelve LibriVox volunteers read it in about nine hours.

This is a LibriVox recording, read by volunteers and dedicated to the public domain; its audio files are kept by the Internet Archive, which plays and serves them here. Public-domain status differs from country to country, so check the law where you live before republishing it. Do you hold rights in this work? Request its removal