SAXTONS RIVER — Like many students, Elayne Clift first read The Scarlet Letter in high school and has admired the character of Hester Prynne ever since.
“Hester Prynne has always been my literary heroine,” she says. “I just think she's the most extraordinary woman, and I love the story.”
Enough so that Clift has moved Prynne and her daughter, Pearl, from the Puritan setting of Hawthorne's original and has re-imagined the characters in a more modern setting.
Hester's Daughters, Clift's new novel, chronicles the lives of the female leads from Hester's birth in 1929 to an adult Pearl's journey to Africa in 2005.
Daughters follows a very similar storyline to The Scarlet Letter, including Hester's relationship with a man she cannot marry, and raising their daughter, the product of that relationship, alone.
But what happens when strong female leads are put into an era that provides many more opportunities for women and their roles in society than the oppressive setting of Massachusetts in the 1600s?
“My Hester, being contemporary, goes on for higher education,” Clift says. “My Hester earns a Ph.D., with a lot of support from other women. Hawthorne's Hester was totally isolated and although she was literate, she had no formal education.”
“But both Hesters are similar in nature; they are strong, sensitive, and some would say prideful women. People come to depend on them. They love their daughters fiercely.
“But I think my Hester is somewhat more resilient because of the time in which the story takes place,” Clift says.
Clift, who teaches women's studies, used her expertise in contemporary feminism, and her knowledge of feminist history and its second wave, as background for the novel.
“There's so much of the history of the second wave of feminism that plays big in the story,” she says.
Her Hester, she says, “has the same strengths and meanings in other people's lives [as the original Hester]. But she represents the modern woman and modern life. She comes through these things because of the support of the modern feminist.”
“She doesn't retreat back to the cottage,” Clift says. “She's a stronger, more resilient Hester. What Hester represents in her time and what she represents in my book is really important. She's the prototypical feminist.”
What became of Pearl?
Unless you are well-acquainted with Hawthorne's classic novel, the plot parallels of Hester's Daughters might evade some readers.
The book recreates the main events in Letter, including the famous scaffold scene where Pearl's father reveals his identity.
“All the major events and characters [of Letter] are replicated in a modern context, but some of it is nuanced,” Clift says. “You'd have to have read Letter fairly recently to get it.”
The novel answers the question that prompted her to write the novel: Whatever became of Pearl?
The second half of the book is about Pearl and her life, which very closely parallels her mother's, says Clift, who wove the retelling around “a lot of real feminist history of the period.”
She says that the main inspiration - which she describes as the “seed” - for her book came up during a writers' retreat.
“We were talking about books that we loved. I mentioned The Scarlet Letter and said, 'No one ever says what happened to Pearl. I wonder what happened to Pearl?'
“Then shortly after, I got a fortune cookie that said, 'A childhood book will have new meaning for you.'
It was a message.
“But I knew I couldn't write historical fiction. So I decided to 'write what I know.' I set the story in modern times with a strong feminist backdrop,” she says. “I think it works.”
Both characters are “strong women,” Clift says: three-dimensional, intelligent women with strong senses of themselves as individuals.
“Both of these women are choosing to honor their true selves,” she says. “They're not willing or emotionally able to compromise themselves or the men they're involved with.”
She describes Hester as “a woman of extraordinary strength, and that strength shows itself in her prideful demeanor.”
“For example, when she embroiders the 'A' for Adulterer that she's condemned to wear on her chest, she does so rather flamboyantly,” she says.
“But she also carries herself with such dignity throughout the story,” Clift says. “That's what I tried to capture with my Hester.”
In Clift's story, Hester's daughter, Pearl, is “deeply devoted to her creativity,” she adds.
“In addition to sort of saving their men, each is very dedicated to a sense of self, a sense of dignity, self-worth, and being who they are in the world.”
Challenge for a 'succinct' writer
Clift, whose monthly column appears in The Commons, describes herself as a “succinct” writer whose short stories are usually only 2,500 words or shorter.
She noted the “many, many, many revisions and lots of readers along the way.”
“I had one professional editor who really helped me to get the structural part of it right,” she says. “I wrote it in vignettes and had to weave them together, so it was pretty challenging.”
As for future projects, Clift is currently working on a non-fiction work, Birth Ambassadors, about doula-supporters in the U.S. She is also compiling a collection of short stories under the title Children of the Chalet.
She doubts she will ever attempt another novel-length story again.
“I wasn't working on it constantly, but from the time I got the idea till actually having the book in my hands was about 15 years,” she says.