HannahCalder (Silmara Emde)

Just shy of 175 years ago, Hester Prynne secured a primo spot in literary history. Arguably, thanks to school curricula and films such as Easy A, Hester remains a familiar name. 

In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne describes the enigmatic character as a “figure of perfect elegance,” with dark, abundant hair that was “so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam.” When Hester appears in Hester in Sunlight – a novel of 94 chapters that’s nevertheless compact – Hannah Calder (Piranesi’s Figures) dispenses with the romantic glow. She is now the “ever sacrificing, sex-loving un-wife, who sweeps the town’s dust with the hem of her skirt so that she leaves a trail.” (Doomed lover Arthur Dimmesdale, meanwhile, fares less well: “he is mentally improbable and morally gelatinous.”)

Hester in Sunlight isn’t a sequel in the vein of those novels inspired by the masterpieces of Jane Austen and the Brontës. Nor is it an easygoing, fun read. The novel seems highly personal, which can mean at times that the reader may struggle to glean meanings from the story. Nimbly poetic, unapologetically pensive, and deeply idiosyncratic, it’s a Schrödinger’s novel – simultaneously certain and uncertain. 

The gist of the narrative is simple. A writer travels to rural England to reconnect with family while working on a novel about The Scarlet Letter. The narrator – variously described as  “selfish and obsessive,” “a person with a uterus writing a book,” and a “complicated fish” – struggles daily, hourly. Her book – “is supposed to be a novel,” a “‘thinly disguised autobiography,’” a “novel atop a novel,” and “not a novel. It’s depression” – confounds her. 

In short, punchy, and often agonized chapters, she ponders the “fictional” family and “wallpaper people” that inhabit her story. The “Scarlet Letter thingy” is a torment – “I burn here in my task to meet a word count. I tremble at the thought of another year picking at the scab that is my imagination” – and yet a compulsion that many writers will recognize.

When she takes a break from Hester and Co., the narrator retreats further into introspection. “My avoidance of plot persists into another week of numb nothingness,” she says. “I am sorry for the forest that I have become. Dark. Impenetrable. A little scary.” In Arthur she sees “all my failures, all my mishaps.” As for Hester, “I want her to be like me. A fuckup.” 

As the narrator burns “with menopausal fire,” she turns to bodily analysis (“My old body, denied liberation, hangs around me, like a fur coat at a vegan rally”), nonbinary gender identity (“My identity is not 2020s chic. It burns an acid hole in the middle of me, to the point that I am frequently listless with worry. To the point that I am a descendent of Hester Prynne, taut with silence”), and her overall mental well-being (“Off the rails for all to see. In need of a team of shrinks to fan me with the pages of the DSM-5”). 

The narrator’s personal revelations interweave with Hawthorne’s creation: they are immediate, interesting, and relatable; however, they demote Hester and Co. to subordinates of the writer and her anxiety. Strangely, when cleared of the weighty name in its title, Hester in Sunlight feels unencumbered. And riveting as a result.