About the Book

As is often the case with spouses of celebrities, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne was overshadowed by her husband. While Nathaniel Hawthorne is renowned for numerous publications, including The Scarlet Letter, that staple in high school English curricula, Sophia's remarkable life and career did not receive the recognition they deserve. She was, however, a source for many of Nathaniel's stories and responsible for much that he accomplished. Sophia was an artist, one of the first in America to earn income from her painting and decorative arts; she was also a writer and traveler to foreign countries at a time when women typically confined their activities to the home. Patricia Dunlavy Valenti began to tell this story in Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: A Life, Volume 1, 1809-1847 (2004). This biography concludes now in a second volume, which details the less examined and more surprising second half of Sophia's life.

Valenti's thorough research culminates in a compelling, revealing account of Sophia's travels to Britain and Europe and her intense personal relationships outside her marriage with men and women, among them notable figures in American history and literature. As an impoverished widow, Sophia dealt resourcefully with the consequences of her husband's financial carelessness; as a mother, her liberal practices resulted in unintended, sometimes unfortunate consequences. Throughout every vicissitude, her relentless optimism prevailed.

With the publication of Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: A Life, Volume 2, 1848-1871, Sophia emerges forever from the shadow cast by her husband. Historians and general readers alike will be drawn to this riveting account of an interesting, important woman and what her life reveals about American history and culture at a moment of national conflict, emerging class divisions, and evolving gender roles.
About the Author: Patricia Dunlavy Valenti is Professor Emerita in the Department of English, Theatre, and Languages at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. The first volume of her biography of Sophia Peabody Hawthorne is also available from the University of Missouri Press. She resides in Pinehurst, North Carolina, and New York City.

Full bio: Patricia Dunlavy Valenti grew up in New York City where her education nurtured a love for literature and history that flourishes in writing biography. Although her doctoral dissertation in the Department of English at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill focused upon Nathaniel Hawthorne's fiction, Valenti soon discovered her real interests: the lives of the Hawthorne women. To Myself A Stranger: A Biography of Rose Hawthorne Lathrop (Louisiana State University Press, 1991), Valenti's first book, focused upon Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne's youngest child who became a Roman Catholic, left her husband, and founded an order of nuns devoted to caring for terminal cancer patients. Valenti's two-volume Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, A Life (University of Missouri Press, 2004, 2015) presents an artist, writer, editor, adventurous traveler, passionate wife, mother and friend who deservedly emerges from the shadow cast by her husband. In this biography, as well as in numerous scholarly articles, Valenti explores the domestic politics of authorship, the term she uses to describe subtle familial and marital influences upon imagination, artistic originality, and intellectual property.

In order to craft the portrait of this formerly misrepresented, mid-nineteenth-century figure and the tumultuous times in which she lived, Valenti examined Sophia's voluminous writing in archives across the United States. This research was supported by several grants, most notably a yearlong fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. During more than two decades of research, Valenti published the first print edition of Sophia's American Notebooks and edited Sophia's Cuba Journal for the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection's digital edition at the New York Public Library website.

Valenti is Professor Emerita in the Department of English and Theatre at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke where she directed the Graduate Program in English Education. During her teaching career, she authored Understanding the Old Man and the Sea: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents (Greenwood Press, 2002) and held visiting professorships at the United States Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, CO, and at the United States Military Academy, West Point, NY, where she received the Outstanding Civilian Service Award. Valenti received several teaching awards, among them the University of North Carolina Board of Governors' Award for Excellence in Teaching. She is a member of the Women's National Book Association, the Authors Guild, Women Writing Women's Lives, and The Biography Seminar, and she is on the advisory board of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society. With her husband, Peter Valenti, she resides in Pinehurst, North Carolina, and New York City.