Ordinary Mysteries

From the summer of 1842 through the fall of 1843, Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne kept a common journal of their daily lives in a notebook. The journal records the ordinary events and activities that occupied them as newlyweds: walks through the countryside around Concord, appraisals of their new home, encounters with neighbors (among them Emerson, Fuller, and Thoreau), descriptions of the weather and the changing seasons -- all material that Hawthorne would later draw on for the preface to his second collection of tales, “Mosses from an Old Manse” (1846). Its most persistent note, however, is the mutual expression of marital happiness. This volume makes available for the first time a full facsimile edition of the journal.