Status Updates From The Peabody Sisters

“Now [Elizabeth] was thirty-four years old, with nearly two decades of experience in trying to attain and wield personal influence. It had never been simple: treading a path between personal ambition, something denied to well-mannered women, and the more acceptable choice to commit her formidable energy and intellect to serving the men of promise she seemed almost mystically able to recognize and draw out” (368)

Nathaniel Hawthorne is on the scene! I'm interested in him because of just reading The Marble Faun in November. He has such a fascinating/weird family set up with his widowed mother and his two sisters who were basically all recluses. No wonder his novels are odd, lol