TEXT DESCRIPTION: Frontispiece. The young woman stood fully revealed. Hester steps out of the prison door into the sunshine, with her chin high, but obviously conscious of many eyes upon her--though we can't see the crowd we sense it. She is wearing a long pale dress and robe with the red letter A on her chest. Pearl is asleep in her arms, with her head at Hester's neck, and also wears a long dress and cap. Pearl's arm partly obscures the letter. Master Brackett, the jailer, is just to her left and just behind, as if his arm is on her back. He wears a high-crowned Puritan hat, his official leather sash and sword, and holds his official staff forward with his left hand. He looks down, not at the crowd, and watches her take a very small step forward. Hester, very erect, young and beautiful with her long hair down, looks fixedly and unsmilingly over the crowd and seems pale, but with red cheeks. She wears a white cap with points to the side that today might be worn by nurses. We can't see if she is wearing a wedding ring. The old rose bush is in flower just outside the door to her right, and the jail already looks old with its unpainted boards.
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Illustration is by Hugh Thomson, from an edition of The Scarlet Letter by George H. Doran, Company, New York, printed by Morrison and Gibb Limited, Edinburgh, no date or copyright notice. The color illustrations are tipped in, approximately the size of this screen rendering. Note that the JPEG file here is at 150 dpi, it has been electronically enhanced to add saturation to the faded colors of the print edition, at 75% compression it loses a little content, and the image has been artificially blurred so as to make the dots of the printing process fuse in the screen image.
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