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Ah, but let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be always in her heart.

A tale of sin, punishment, and atonement, The Scarlet Letter exposes the moral rigidity of a seventeenth-century Puritan New England community when faced with the illegitimate child of a young mother. Regarded as the first real heroine of American fiction, it is Hester Prynne's strength of character that resonates with the reader when her harsh sentence is cast. It is in her refusal to reveal the identity of the father in the face of her accusers that Hawthorne champions his heroine and berates the weakness of society for attacking the innocent.

Elizabeth McGovern is a musician and actress best known for her role as Cora in the BBC's Downton Abbey. She studied at Juilliard and San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater. She has been nominated for many awards for her acting, including the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She has narrated numerous audiobooks and won two AudioFile Earphones Awards.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was born in Salem, Massachusetts, and made his ambition to be a writer while still a teenager. He graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine, where the poet Longfellow was also a student, and spent several years traveling in New England and writing short stories before his best known novel, The Scarlet Letter, was published in 1850. His writing was not at first financially rewarding, and he worked as measurer and surveyor in the Boston and Salem Custom Houses. In 1853 he was sent to Liverpool as American consul and then lived in Italy before returning to the United States in 1860, where he died in his sleep four years later.