Searching for Hester Prynne
A BC novel compares a historical fiction character to a contemporary fiction character.
January 09th, 2025
Hannah Calder lives on unceded Syilx Okanagan territory in Vernon.
Hester in Sunlight explores struggles with family, gender identity and creativity while attempting to reimagine Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 anti-heroine, Hester Prynne, blending metafiction with modern societal critiques.
Reviewed by Susan Sanford Blades
Hester Prynne, the main character and wearer of the infamous red “A” in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s nineteenth-century novel, The Scarlet Letter, has been revisited in literature several times—from a prequel featuring Hawthorne himself, to a sequel narrating Hester’s life post-Scarlet Letter. Hannah Calder’s third novel, Hester in Sunlight, beckons Hester Prynne back to the page, but does so in typical Calder fashion, which is to say, in a very atypical way.
Calder’s book features an unnamed author/narrator who is attempting to write a novel about Hester Prynne. This unnamed author creates a family to appear in their book that, they admit, is closely based on their real-life family. As the unnamed author struggles both with an increasing depression and with the task of writing a novel about Hester, they spend what began as a weekend but then stretches into an unknown number of days in the country with the above-mentioned family. It seems like it might be Christmas time at first, but the seasons and weather change at the author’s discretion. The book ping-pongs between story lines featuring Hester’s life and the author’s life in short, one to two page–long chapters. I use the term “story line” loosely here, since there is no real narrative arc to speak of in this exercise in metafiction.
Throughout the book, the author dives into sections of The Scarlet Letter and stews in them awhile, critiquing Hawthorne’s Hester and comparing Hester’s life to the author/narrator’s life. They note we, in our twenty first–century lives, are as constrained as seventeenth-century Hester, only the shackles have changed. The author looks out their window into “the woods behind this dark life of rules and schedules and inboxes.” They liken their teenaged niece and nephew, stuck in “Internet quicksand” to Hawthorne’s Gossips, trapped in their attention-seeking Puritan blame game. Calder is most successful in making a connection between Hester and the author/narrator as people living outside the edges of societal acceptability. The author authentically captures the guilt, the shame, the illicit nature of a mother who writes. They wear a red “A” of their own when they continually remove themself from their family in order to work on this novel—an act misunderstood and begrudged by their husband and child. Interestingly, where Hester’s society is made aware of her sin through the fruits of her act (her out-of-wedlock daughter, Pearl), the author’s act of writing is sinful, seemingly, because it often bears no tangible fruit.
The author also tackles the issue of gender identity, which is where this novel strays from its original task of comparison with The Scarlet Letter. The author’s child is gender fluid, and the author comes out to their family as nonbinary. An “‘other man’,” they say, “lives inside [them] and berates [their] fleshy parts.” These are thoughtful meditations on gender, but they aren’t fleshed out enough to take the novel anywhere.
Sentence by sentence, Calder’s book is a triumph—her prose is elegant, with stunning imagery, diction and humour. But though its form, in its defiance of convention, suits its content, this book may be a victim of its own cleverness. With its many literary allusions—to Hawthorne, John Donne, and others, it at times reads like an inside joke to those who hold English degrees and may alienate those who do not.
Beyond the sentence-level, the book has no narrative arc to speak of. The author’s musings circle around a continuously postponed family picnic, one they can barely bring themselves to think about due to their depression and the repercussions of past family trauma that is only ever hinted at. This picnic would have been enough to bring the elements of the book together, to guide the reader to a climax of sorts, to some epiphanies about the author’s strained relationship with their family. But this picnic never happens. The author themself asserts, “these still images, these flashes of place and time, pine for narrative, pretend to be narrative” and calls their work an “un-story,” but I wonder if it’s a bit of a cop-out to write an un-story about a writer writing an un-story.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate unconventional novels. Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2024/Vintage Canada, 2025), in which she created a narrative by alphabetizing her diaries from a ten-year portion of her life, was one of my favourites of last year. My frustration with Hester in Sunlight lies in the fact that it does not accomplish what it set out to do. The author ostensibly embarked upon this project to give Hester a voice they believe Hawthorne did not allow her. “I want [Hester] to be alive,” they proclaim. But by creating this work that exists solely in the musings of the author, we never see Hester in a recreated scene, where she might actually use her voice, speak dialogue, take actions, change the course of her story. The author’s words, though beautiful, never actually bring Hester back to life. 9781554202102
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Victoria-based Susan Sanford Blades published her debut novel, Fake It So Real (Nightwood) in 2020.
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