The House of the Seven Gables

Hepzibah Pyncheon is a dignified but destitute woman residing in the House of the Seven Gables—a manor with a dark history, and her ancestral home. She lives with her brother Clifford, who has completed a thirty-year sentence for murder, and a lodger named Holgrave, who is writing a book about the history of her family. Long ago, Matthew Maule owned the land that the titular house was later built on; but the scheming Colonel Pyncheon, founder of the Pyncheon family, wrongfully seized the land from him, and Maule was accused of witchcraft and condemned to death. Before his sentence was executed, Maule put a curse on the family—and the curse has followed them all the way to Hepzibah, now an older spinster inhabiting the gloomy, moldering house and desperate to make ends meet. But Hepzibah’s prospects brighten considerably when a distant relative, a bright young girl named Phoebe, arrives to stay for a while, helping her set up and run a small shop in a side room of the manor. As the two work to launch their business in the ill-omened house while caring for the withdrawn Clifford, a strange mystery unravels. Hawthorne based his depiction of the House of the Seven Gables on a real house, the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion in Salem, Massachusetts, which was owned by one of his cousins. The Pyncheon family, too, is a real family, ancestors of the novelist Thomas Pynchon—though Hawthorne was unaware of this when he wrote the novel, and was unpleasantly surprised when, on the novel’s success, some of them came out of the woodwork to claim a connection. The novel was well-received on publication, earning praise from contemporaries like Longfellow and Melville. It has since become a classic of American literature, often taught in schools alongside The Scarlet Letter.