The house of the seven gables

In the final years of the seventeenth century in a small town in New England, the venerable Colonel Pyncheon decides to erect a ponderously oak-framed and spacious family mansion. It occupies the spot where Matthew Maule, 'an obscure man', had lived in a log hut, mail his execution for witchcraft. From the scaffold, Maule points his finger at the presiding Colonel and cries 'God will give him blood to drink!' The fate of Colonel Pyncheon exerts a heavy influence on his descendants in the crumbling mansion for the next century and a half. Hawthorne called his novel a 'Romance', drawing on a Gothic tradition which embraced and exploited the thrills of the supernatural. But although a distant family sin appears to have populated the old house with unhappy ghosts, held tenuously between life and death, the arrival of young Phoebe Pyncheon from the country breathes fresh air and sunshine into mouldering lives and rooms, and the novel begins to work against the crushing weight of history. In The House of the Seven Gables (1851) Hawthorne sought to write a story which would show guilt to be a trick of the imagination. The tension between fantasy and a new realism underpins the novel's descriptive virtuosity.

Source : Oxford paperbacks