The Scarlet Letter

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was the 50th book I read for my Classics Club list! 

“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.” ― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

This novel was written in 1850 and is set in the 17th century in the Puritan colony of Massachusetts. The author provides an introduction about (among various other things) how he came to write about this woman. The introduction seemed excessively long and rambling, but once the tale began it moved along at a good pace and didn't wander into unrelated asides. Hester Prynne is being publicly shamed for her sin--she has born a daughter with a man not her husband--at the start of the novel. How she, and the others involved, deal with this makes up the story. The writing is of it's time, but was not hard to read.
This book also counts toward the Back to the Classics challenge as a "classic with a color in the title."