Rappaccini's Daughter

Part fairy tale, part Gothic horror story, Rappaccini’s Daughter is an inspired tale of creation and control. It is published here with two additional short stories by Hawthorne: Young Goodman Brown and A Select Party. Giovanni Guasconti, a student at the University of Padua, is enchanted to discover a nearby garden of the most exquisite beauty. In it abides a young woman, perhaps the most beautiful Giovanni has ever seen. Yet as he looks out from an upstairs window, he soon learns that the garden—and the matchless Beatrice—are not the work of Mother Nature, but rather the result of a monstrous abomination of creativity. An ingenious biblical parody, the tale’s fantastical quality is brilliantly echoed in the two accompanying short stories. Read together, they display all Hawthorne’s gifts as a storyteller. Novelist, essayist, and moralist, Nathaniel Hawthorne is one of America’s greatest writers, best known for his remarkable novel The Scarlet Letter.

Nor did he fail again to observe, or imagine, an analogy between the beautiful girl and the gorgeous shrub that hung its gem-like flowers over the fountain; a resemblance which Beatrice seemed to have indulged a fantastic humor in heightening, both by the arrangement of her dress and the selection of its hues.

"Words -- so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them," Nathaniel Hawthorne once reflected. Hawthorne's own words indeed had an undeniable power. Author of The Scarlet Letter and originator of the American short story, Hawthorne left an indelible impression on literature that would influence his fellow writers into the next century.