Download or read book The Blithedale Romance Illustrated written by Nathaniel Hawthorne and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2020-11-27 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Blithedale Romance (1852) is Nathaniel Hawthorne's third major romance. Its setting is a utopian farming commune based on Brook Farm, of which Hawthorne was a founding member and where he lived in 1841. The novel dramatizes the conflict between the commune's ideals and the members' private desires and romantic rivalries. In Hawthorne (1879), Henry James called it "the lightest, the brightest, the liveliest" of Hawthorne's "unhumorous fictions," while literary critic Richard Brodhead has described it as "the darkest of Hawthorne's novels.