Confessions and Criticisms — Story, Setting & Ideas

A Writer's Self-Defense

In the opening chapter, Hawthorne defends his decision to become a novelist against those who expressed “surprise and indignation that the son of his father should presume to be a novelist.” He recounts rewriting his first novel three times, noting that “the first version was the best of the three.” This self-deprecating honesty extends to his admission that prudent counsellors found his early work “too immoral to publish, except in French.” The passage reveals a writer acutely aware of his literary lineage yet determined to establish his own path, using personal anecdote to preempt criticism of his craft.

Portrait of Anthony Trollope

Hawthorne’s essay on Anthony Trollope offers a nuanced character sketch drawn from Trollope’s autobiography. He describes Trollope as “a quick-tempered man” whose “ardor and hurry of his temperament made him seem more so than he really was.” Hawthorne notes that Trollope’s autobiography “places its subject before the reader more completely and comprehensively than most autobiographies do,” largely through “unconscious self-revelation.” He also recounts Trollope’s unhappy boyhood and his mother’s remarkable literary output—114 volumes by age seventy-six—while nursing dying family members. Hawthorne’s tone mixes admiration with wry observation, as when he remarks on the Trollope family’s collective book production: “The existence of a few more such families could be consistent only with a generous enlargement of the British Museum.”

The Critic as Observer

Throughout the excerpts, Hawthorne demonstrates a critical method grounded in biographical detail and textual inference. He praises Trollope’s “artlessness” as “boyish” and notes that his “acuteness and his transparent but somewhat belated good-sense” made him “something of a paradox—an entertaining contradiction.” Hawthorne avoids abstract theorizing, instead building his assessments from specific traits and anecdotes. His own voice remains conversational yet precise, blending personal recollection with literary analysis. The essays, though varied in subject, share a consistent focus on the writer’s character as revealed through their work—a approach that reflects Hawthorne’s own confessional stance.

Readers approaching Confessions and Criticisms should expect a hybrid work: part memoir, part literary criticism, unified by Julian Hawthorne’s distinctive voice. The essays reward attention to the interplay between his personal disclosures and his judgments of other writers. The catalog subject “American essays” only partially captures the book’s character; it is equally a document of a son navigating a famous literary inheritance.

There’s a strange comfort in watching someone wrestle with their own influences, like Hawthorne sorting through Emerson’s shadow. It made me think of another correspondence—two artists trading raw honesty about their craft, less polished than letters meant for the world. That same quiet, lingering ache of unfinished conversations lives in the Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt — Volume 1 — A Closer Reading, where even their disagreements feel like a form of staying close.