Shelfology Book Pairing

Manga Classics

by Jane Austen

Beloved by millions the world over, Pride and Prejudice is delightfully transformed in this bold new Manga Classics adaptation. In a remote English village, Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, a not-so-well-to do country squire and his wife, must marry off their five vivacious daughters. At the very center of this all-consuming enterprise are the headstrong second daughter, Elizabeth and her aristocratic suitor Mister Darcy, two lovers in whom pride and prejudice must be overcome before love can bringthe story to its magnificent conclusion.

A Novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne

by Nathaniel HAWTHORNE

The Scarlet Letter opens with a long preamble about how the book came to be written. The nameless narrator was the surveyor of the customhouse in Salem, Massachusetts. In the customhouse's attic, he discovered a number of documents, among them a manuscript that was bundled with a scarlet, gold-embroidered patch of cloth in the shape of an "A." The manuscript, the work of a past surveyor, detailed events that occurred some two hundred years before the narrator's time. When the narrator lost his customs post, he decided to write a fictional account of the events recorded in the manuscript. The Scarlet Letter is the final product. The story begins in seventeenth-century Boston, then a Puritan settlement. A young woman, Hester Prynne, is led from the town prison with her infant daughter, Pearl, in her arms and the scarlet letter "A" on her breast. A man in the crowd tells an elderly onlooker that Hester is being punished for adultery. Hester's husband, a scholar much older than she is, sent her ahead to America, but he never arrived in Boston. The consensus is that he has been lost at sea. While waiting for her husband, Hester has apparently had an affair, as she has given birth to a child. She will not reveal her lover's identity, however, and the scarlet letter, along with her public shaming, is her punishment for her sin and her secrecy. On this day Hester is led to the town scaffold and harangued by the town fathers, but she again refuses to identify her child's father.