Resumen
Resumen de Musgos de una Antigua Casa Parroquial
Para quién es
For readers who love short, strange stories with a moral edge, and anyone curious about early American writing and the Puritan past. These tales bring together mystery, guilt, wit and the limits of science and progress.
De qué trata este libro
Mosses from an Old Manse is a collection of tales and sketches by Nathaniel Hawthorne, published in 1846. He wrote many of the pieces while living in the Old Manse, a parsonage beside the river in Concord, Massachusetts, during the first years of his marriage. Some had already appeared in magazines. He gathered them into a book and added a new opening essay about the house itself.
The collection holds some of his best-known stories, among them Young Goodman Brown, The Birth-Mark and Rappaccini's Daughter. It also holds satires, allegories and odd little sketches that mix jokes with warnings. Most of them ask one question in different dress. Where does evil live, in the world around us or in the human heart? You get fear, wit and moral puzzles, told in calm, careful prose by a writer whose own family history reached back to Puritan Salem. Let us begin where Hawthorne does, at the door of the old house.
En este resumen
- 1A Quiet House Holds Many GhostsFree
- 2A Good Man Walks Into the Forest
- 3Science and Love Fail to Mix
- 4Progress Gets a Gentle Roasting
- 5Secret Guilt Eats at the Heart
- 6How Hawthorne Tells His Tales
Idea clave 1 de 6
A Quiet House Holds Many Ghosts
The book opens with The Old Manse, an essay about the house where Hawthorne lived from 1842 to 1845. It stands beside the Concord River, close to the bridge where the first shots of the American Revolution were fired. It was built for the minister William Emerson, and his grandson, the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, had worked there before Hawthorne moved in. Hawthorne describes the place with affection and a dry sense of humor.
He writes of the orchard, the river and the vegetable garden he plants. He takes a boat out on the slow water and watches the light change. He imagines the old ministers who prayed and preached in the house, and he tells how he found their sermons in the attic, dusty and dull. Out of such small details comes a gentle mood, half real and half dreamy. The title suggests that the tales grew slowly in this place, like moss on old stone.
Yet the essay is not only pleasant. Hawthorne reminds us that soldiers died near the bridge and that the past lies close under the lawn. He is a writer who feels history as a presence, not a list of dates. That habit shapes the whole collection, where ordinary places and ordinary people hide something heavy and strange.
The essay also tells you what kind of reader he wants. The tales that follow are mixed in form, so expect to move from a ghostly fable to a joke to a sermon within a few pages. A single scene strikes hard. Once you hear his calm voice, you will know it in every piece.
That’s 1 of 6 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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Who’s who
- Young Goodman Brown
- A young Puritan of Salem, he leaves his new wife Faith for a mysterious nighttime errand.
- Faith
- Brown's young wife wears pink ribbons and begs her husband to stay home with her.
- Aylmer
- A gifted scientist and Georgiana's husband, he regards her small birthmark as an intolerable imperfection.
- Georgiana
- Aylmer's wife bears a hand-shaped birthmark and consents to his attempt to remove it.
- Giovanni Guasconti
- A young student in Padua, he watches Doctor Rappaccini's garden and falls in love with Beatrice.
- Beatrice Rappaccini
- Doctor Rappaccini's daughter tends his strange plants and attracts the attention of the student Giovanni.
- Doctor Rappaccini
- Beatrice's father is a physician who cultivates dangerous plants and closely guards his daughter.
- Reuben Bourne
- A young frontiersman, he is Roger Malvin's wounded companion after a battle in the wilderness.
- Roger Malvin
- An older wounded man, he urges his younger companion Reuben Bourne to leave him behind.
About this edition
Every format is free to start, and print and large print are at cost.
- LengthAbout 159,000 words
- Reading timeAbout 10 h 40 min
- FormatseBook, large-print eBook, audiobook, 15-minute summary
- LanguagesEnglish and 12 other languages
Questions about Musgos de una Antigua Casa Parroquial
What is Mosses from an Old Manse about?
It is a collection of tales and sketches by Hawthorne. They deal with guilt, doubt, pride and the limits of science and progress. The book opens with an essay about the Concord house where he lived and wrote.
What is the Old Manse in the title?
It is a parsonage in Concord, Massachusetts, built for the minister William Emerson. Hawthorne lived there with his wife in the early 1840s, and many of the tales were written during his stay.
Which stories are in Mosses from an Old Manse?
The best known are Young Goodman Brown, The Birth-Mark and Rappaccini's Daughter. It also includes The Celestial Railroad, Earth's Holocaust, Feathertop, Roger Malvin's Burial, Egotism, and many shorter sketches.
When was Mosses from an Old Manse published?
It was published in 1846. The tales are fiction, though several draw on real New England history, and a few had appeared in magazines before being gathered into the book.
Is Hawthorne hard to read?
The tales are short and clear in purpose. Watching for symbols makes them rewarding. The shorter comic pieces are the easiest starting point.