The House of the Seven Gables

The House of the Seven Gables is a novel written by Nathaniel Hawthorne and originally published in 1851.

The setting of the novel is a 17th century house in Salem, New England. It was built on the same site where the house of Mathew Maule, a man who was accused of sorcery, stood years earlier.

The owner of the new house is Colonel Pyncheon, who had attended Maule's trial and obviously has a vested interest in keeping his land. However, in the course of the trial Maule puts a curse on the Colonel and it will follow him and his future generations.

The curse seems to have worked as the colonel dies on the day the new mansion is inaugurated... and it is there that the entire novel takes place.

The novel deals with themes such as sin and guilt, in which the characters try to flee from their sins and from others in order to leave behind the guilt of the past.

"When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel."