House of the Seven Gables, The - Nathaniel Hawthorne

To make any sense of "The house of the Seven gables" I think you are going to need some background about the writer and the period of origin. This is an odd book to say the least. Nathaniel Hawthorn is American and was writing in the 19th century. Victorian contemporaries in the UK may have struck you as being ponderous, but this man wanders on an entirely new scale. The time of writing favoured propriety - again a trait you'll encounter with Victorian authors. In Hawthorn, this manifests in a strong desire not to say anything scandalous about his fictional characters. This can make it very hard to unravel his plots, as the sex and violence, where ...