Adult

At the end of Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic novel, The Scarlet Letter, we know that Pearl, the elf-child daughter of Hester Prynne, is somewhere in Europe, comfortable, well set, and a mother herself now. But it could not have been easy for to arrive at such a place when she begins life as the bastard child of a woman publicly humiliated, again and again, in an unrelentingly judgmental Puritan world. With a brilliant and authentic sense of that time and place, Deborah Noyes envisions the path Pearl takes to make herself whole and to carve her place in the New World.