A review by markludmon
The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne

5.0

In The Blithedale Romance, rootless dilettante Miles Coverdale joins an experiment to set up a farming-based collective community in Massachusetts. But the ideal of creating a Utopia is quickly undermined by personal passions and the dynamics of the group, exposing their misplaced and conflicting objectives. Coverdale ends up becoming obsessed with finding out the secret stories of two members of the community: an elegant woman named Zenobia and a younger woman called Priscilla who circle around the de facto leader Hollingsworth. Told by the detached bachelor Coverdale himself, the narrative is full of ambiguities and unreliable speculation, reflected by recurring references to partially seen and veiled realities. It depicts an America caught between its lost and barely known pre-colonial past and the restless urban development of the 19th century.