THE OTHER SISTER.(Nathaniel Hawthorne)(Biography)

On the evening of November 11, 1837, Nathaniel Hawthorne, accompanied by his sisters, Elizabeth (Ebe) and Louisa, stopped at the Peabody home, in Salem, Massachusetts. It was Hawthorne's first visit to the family, though he lived just a few blocks away. Painfully shy, he had spent the previous ten years in almost complete seclusion, composing short stories at a desk in his bedroom in the hope of establishing himself as a professional writer. Elizabeth Peabody, the eldest of the three Peabody sisters, who were then living with their parents on Charter Street, had read and admired the stories in Hawthorne's first book, "Twice-Told Tales," which had been published that spring. She was impatient to meet him.

Elizabeth, like Hawthorne, was thirty-three years old. A woman of prodigious energy and determination, she belonged to an impoverished branch of an old New England family (the Peabody Museums at Harvard and Yale, and the Peabody-Essex Museum, in Salem, were named for a distant relative), and had managed to befriend many of the leading thinkers of her time, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had tutored her in Greek when she was a teen-ager. In her twenties, she had begun corresponding with Wordsworth, whose poems, she declared, "define all the mysteries of the heart."

The abolitionist minister Theodore Parker called Elizabeth the transcendentalists' Boswell, but she was more accurately an instigator and an impresario. Emerson read her translations of French and German Romantic philosophy, including "Self-Education," by Baron Joseph-Marie de Gerando, which she published in 1830, at twenty-six--seven years before Emerson proposed the idea in his essay "The American Scholar." In 1834, she and Bronson Alcott, the father of Louisa May Alcott, founded the progressive Temple School, in Boston. A year later, she published "Record of a School," a series of dialogues between Alcott and his students on art, religion, and "the advantage of having an imagination"--the first book-length exposition of transcendentalist ideas.

Literary historians have portrayed Hawthorne's first visit to the Peabody home as a turning point, marking his entrance into public life and the beginning of his transformation from an obscure short-story writer into the world-famous author of "The Scarlet Letter." In 1842, Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody, Elizabeth's youngest sister. "There are only a few great love stories in American fiction, and there are fewer still in the lives of American writers," Malcolm Cowley wrote in a 1958 essay, "The Hawthornes in Paradise." Cowley declared Hawthorne's "courtship and conquest of Sophia Peabody" a story that should be retold "as long as there are lovers in New England." Invoking "The Scarlet Letter," he added that, unlike the novel, "the lived story was neither sinful nor tragic."

However, the marital idyll had a troubling prelude, which shows Hawthorne in a harsher light. On the night of his first appearance at the Peabodys', Elizabeth enthusiastically befriended Hawthorne, and he seemed to welcome her attention. Over the next few months, he visited her frequently--before entering the parlor, he would steal up to the door and peer through the crevice, to make sure that no other visitors were present--and they were often seen walking together in Salem.

In April, 1838, five months after they met, there were rumors in Salem that, as Hawthorne reported with amusement in a letter to friends, "I am engaged to two ladies in this city." In the weeks leading up to his wedding to Sophia, some Salem residents still didn't know which Peabody he intended to marry. Whichever sister became Hawthorne's wife, the lawyer Benjamin Merrill wrote to Salem's Whig congressman Leverett Saltonstall, "The world may be blessed with transcendental literary productions."

Scholars have traditionally dismissed the notion that Elizabeth and Hawthorne were romantically involved, citing an account that Elizabeth gave her nephew, Julian Hawthorne, in 1882, twelve years before her death, and that Julian incorporated in his 1884 biography, "Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife." Elizabeth told Julian that Sophia had been too ill to come downstairs during Hawthorne's first visit. But they met "soon after," she said, depicting their romance as "the coming together of two self-sufficing worlds," with "all the glow of the rush together of young hearts."