The story of Zenobia in The House of the Seven Gables is taken from the suicide of Martha Hunt. Standing at the periphery of the Transcendentalists in Concord, Hunt embraced its lessons of equality for women and its transformative intellectual lessons; however, the intellectual promise of her associations turned to despair and led to her suicide illustrating the darker side of the movement.

Of the “classic” antebellum authors who lived to write about the Civil War, none was so artistically disabled by it as Nathaniel Hawthorne. Turning from his biting satire “Chiefly About War-Matters” to compose a new romance, he struggled with it until he died, no longer capable of “beautifying and idealizing our rude, material life.”