The Scarlet Letter - Paperback

Introduction and Notes by Henry Claridge, Senior Lecturer, School of English, University of Kent at Canterbury.

This is a troubling story of crime, sin, guilt, punishment and expiation, set in the rigid moral climate of 17th-century New England. The young mother of an illegitimate child confronts her Puritan judges.

However, it is not so much her harsh sentence, but the cruelties of slowly...