纳撒尼尔·霍桑（1804-1864），美国19世纪后期浪漫主义文学的重要作家。他的代表作《红字》一经问世，便引起了巨大轰动。小说以深邃的主题，象征、隐喻等艺术手法的运用而形成了独特的风格，其象征手法影响了《白鲸》的作者麦尔维尔、法国的波德莱尔以及现代派文学的象征主义。此外，霍桑对美国文学史上一批卓有成就的作家诸如海明威、菲兹杰拉德、福克纳等都产生较大影响。

    There could not be a more perfect work of the American imagination than The Scarlet Letter.

　                                                                                                                                     　- D. H. Lawrence  

　　"It is beautiful, admirable, extraordinary; it has in the highest degree that merit which I have spoken of as the mark of Hawthorne's best things-an indefinable purity and lightness of conception...One can often return to it; it supports familiarity and has the inexhaustible charm and mystery of great works of art."

　                                                                                                                                     　- Henry James

　　The Scarlet Letter is a work of historical fiction by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne, published in 1850, and was an instant best-seller. It is also one of the first mass-produced books in America.

　　Set in Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony during the years 1642 to 1649, the novel tells the story of Hester Prynne who conceives a daughter through an affair and then struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity. The book explores themes of legalism, sin, and guilt.

　　The Scarlet Letter was one of the first mass-produced books in America. It was popular when first published and is considered a classic work today. It inspired numerous film, television, and stage adaptations. Critics have described it as a masterwork and novelist D. H. Lawrence called it a "perfect work of the American imagination".

THE PRISON-DOOR

　　A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments and gray steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.

　　The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prisonhouse somewhere in the vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson's lot, and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard of King's Chapel. Certain it is that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.

　　This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it,-or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson as she entered the prison-door, we shall not take upon us to determine. Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers, and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.

INTRODUCTORY /1

Chapter 1  THE PRISON-DOOR /43

Chapter 2  THE MARKET-PLACE /45

Chapter 3  THE RECOGNITION /55

Chapter 4  THE INTERVIEW /65

Chapter 5  HESTER AT HER NEEDLE /72

Chapter 6  PEARL /82

Chapter 7  THE GOVERNOR'S HALL /92

Chapter 8  THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER /99

Chapter 9  THE LEECH /108

Chapter 10  THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENTS /119

Chapter 11  THE INTERIOR OF A HEART /129

Chapter 12  THE MINISTER'S VIGIL /137

Chapter 13  ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER /148

Chapter 14  HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN /157

Chapter 15  HESTER AND PEARL /164

Chapter 16  A FOREST WALK /172

Chapter 17  THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER /179

Chapter 18  A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE /189

Chapter 19  THE CHILD AT THE BROOK-SIDE /196

Chapter 20  THE MINISTER IN A MAZE /203

Chapter 21  THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY /214

Chapter 22  THE PROCESSION /224

Chapter 23  THE REVELATION OF THE SCARLET LETTER /235

Chapter 24  THE CONCLUSION /244