Her portrait of the author as a young man is a boldly imaginative move that lets readers enter Hawthorne’s own creative process. Hoffman’s regard for Hawthorne also led her to make him a living character in her book. Hoffman’s latest novel, The Invisible Hour. She believes that this shame moved Hawthorne, 200 years later, to write his novel. In her research, she learned that Nathaniel Hawthorne was descended from one of the judges in the Salem witch trials in the 1640s - the only one, Hoffman said, who refused to apologize for sentencing those women to death. She described rereading Hawthorne’s novel and discovering in a fresh way the author’s respect for and generosity toward women. In our conversation, Hoffman spoke of her distress over the reversal of Roe v. … I fear that time is with us again, and women don’t have the right to make decisions about their own bodies.” But she should have had the choice to decide what to do with her own body and her own fate. The daughter is told this about her mother: “She was only a girl, … Remember that. In Hoffman’s novel, a similar warning is sounded. Once in a great while the thoughts, that had seemed so vital and so active, yet had been put to rest so quickly, revived again.” In the preface to Hawthorne’s novel, he writes this ominous caution: “But the past is not dead. The Scarlet Letter and The Invisible Hour are both about women who, in spite of being punished for becoming pregnant, chose to give birth to and raise “illegitimate” daughters. “When I first read The Scarlet Letter,” Hoffman writes, “it pierced my heart and helped me to understand my mother in a deeper way.” The fictional hero of her book discovers Hawthorne’s novel in her town library and understands that “it was the book that had kept her alive, the one that seemed to tell the story of her mother’s life, the one she’d always imagined had been written for her.” The new novel begins with a two-page note addressed “Dear Reader.” She introduces her own mother, who was a social worker, and the suburban Long Island world she grew up in whose conservative 1950s values made them outcasts. “Every novel,” she said, “is an experience of time travel when the reader enters into and becomes engaged by a fictional world.” In The Invisible Hour, the magic involves time travel.

Hoffman’s persistent themes are the betrayal of women by men, the complex relationships between mothers and daughters, and the willing suspension of disbelief - the magic - that her writing enables readers to experience. We shared the stage for a recent program at the Boston Athenaeum marking the publication of her latest novel, The Invisible Hour, an echoing meditation on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, written in the form of a contemporary woman’s struggle for freedom from the puritanical rules set by men. She has now written more than 30 works of fiction. By then she had published her fifth novel, Fortune’s Daughter. I was one of Alice Hoffman’s first fans, but I didn’t meet her until around 1985. The New York Times called it “a remarkably envisioned novel, almost mythic in its cadences, hypnotic….” Her first novel, Property Of, came out in 1977.

Ted Solotaroff, the American Review’s legendary editor, had asked Hoffman if she had a novel to show him and she had said, “Yes!” and started writing it that day. I read the story then and was impressed by its portrayal of girls whose denim jackets identified them as the “property of” the boys in a street gang. The future of the world rests on your shoulders.Alice Hoffman’s short story titled “Property Of” was published in the prestigious literary journal American Review: The Magazine of New Writing in 1975 when Hoffman was 23. You have been chosen by the Gods to be their Soulkeeper. Despite their noble efforts to purify the world from his malicious spirit, an evil force emerged, determined to destroy all forms of life. The Goddess Frigg and Odin, King of the Gods, attempted to prevent the unthinkable. The corrupted blood of Ymir the Giant King came to be known as the Shadow Soul, and its spread threatened to contaminate the World Tree, source of all Creation. Gods and Giants, ancient beings bound by blood and hate, fought for supremacy with such brutality that the world was nearly torn apart.

In the beginning, there was the War of the Creators. The hope of the world lies with you, Soulkeeper. The Wrath of the Goddess expansion is now live! Journey to the mysterious continent of Kharath, where the malevolent sorceress, Naez, is plotting to summon an ancient evil into the mortal realm.

Echo of soul