An unpublished leaf from his American Notebooks - photo 1

An unpublished leaf from his American Notebooks

Lot 75
15.06.2023 10:00UTC -05:00
Classic
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$ 3 780
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUSA, New York
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ID 967616
Lot 75 | An unpublished leaf from his American Notebooks
Estimate value
$ 3 000 – 5 000
An unpublished leaf from his American Notebooks

Nathaniel Hawthorne, July 1837

HAWTHORNE, Nathaniel (1804-1864). Autograph manuscript from his American notebooks, [Maine, July 1837]



Two pages on a single leaf, 346 x 145mm (closely trimmed at left margin of recto affecting some words in text with two paper tabs affixed with glue to the same margin).



44 lines of unpublished manuscript from Hawthorne's early notebooks—one of the very few remaining in private ownership. The text was excised from pages nine and ten of Notebook II (1837), which is now part of the Hawthorne Collection at the Pierpont Morgan Library. This leaf is one of several removed from the notebook by Sophia Hawthorne and sent to admirers as souvenirs. According to the Centenary Edition of the American Notebooks, four pages had been partly or fully removed (p. 701). The present leaf falls between the entry dated 5 July 1837 and that for 8 July 1837. The manuscript concerns largely his encounters with Irish and French Canadian laborers during an extended visit to Maine and reads, in part: "As we left the door of the hut, we saw the pretty little dark Canadian woman, above described, running from one house to another, like a squirrel from hole to hole. Bridge called after her in French; and she stopped, just as she was about to vanish into a door, and answered in a cheerful sunny tone — evidently pleased with his notice, and speaking respectfully, yet as if a pretty woman, of whatever rank, had a right to talk with a gentleman." He also records an encounter with an Irish woman, who "insisted much on her reluctance to leave 'the best master she ever lived under'…. trusting by this piece of blarney to enlist him in her favor. On the whole, she showed a desire, and probably a quiet intention to remain where she is; yet it was strange to see how little she was affected by the prospect of being cast off by one who had been as a husband to her during twelve years, at her age too, with no home in the wide world, nor claim upon any one...."

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