English · Advanced
Read The Scarlet Letter in Englishwith every sentence explained
Nathaniel Hawthorne · 1850
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About the book
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne was first published in 1850. In Passage you read the full text in the original English, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 68,000 words.
A red letter "A". A child born in shame. A secret that a whole town wants to uncover.
Boston, in the 1640s. In front of a crowd of stern Puritans, a young woman named Hester Prynne stands on the scaffold holding her baby daughter, Pearl. On her dress is a beautifully embroidered scarlet "A", for adultery, which she must wear for the rest of her life. Her husband has been missing for years; the father of her child is unknown, and Hester refuses to say his name.
Watching from the crowd is a stranger who has just arrived in town, a man with a dark connection to Hester, who swears he will find out who the father is. And among the town's leaders is the young, much-admired minister Arthur Dimmesdale, who is asked to make her confess.
A powerful story of sin, guilt and courage, Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 novel is one of the great classics of American literature.
- Author
- Nathaniel Hawthorne
- First published
- 1850
- Language
- English
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Romance
- Length
- About 68,000 words
How it opens
A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments, and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.
Reading The Scarlet Letter in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in English. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate English book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
