In addition to her considerable correspondence, Sophia Hawthorne left behind several notebooks, journals, and diaries—documents that will allow scholars to follow the incidents of her life in much more consistent detail than can be done for her husband's. He often tried to efface documents of a merely biographical interest, allowing survival much more frequently to notebooks that retained the value of providing brief, generalized subjects or incidents for stories than to anything that savored of the autobiographical or confessional.

During her last years she made use of the format of the Pocket Diary, apparently following Nathaniel's lead. In England in 1856 he had kept such a record, giving a brief, telegraphic report to each day usually on the day itself. Beginning at Paris in 1858, and again in Rome in 1859, he had continued the practice, recording many names and places that did not get into the very full notebooks he was also keeping in preparation for writing The Marble Faun. At that time Mrs. Hawthorne journalized at greater length, but less frequently. She wrote with special detail on visits to museums and galleries. This writing eventually also found print, as Notes on England and Italy.

Upon their return to America in 1860 Hawthorne seems to have abandoned both the notebook and the diary as forms of expression, except for during his trip in March and April 1862 to Washington and the scenes of war in Virginia; but this document's survival is very doubtful. What is now available are a few paragraphs from a moment during his vacation in Maine that same summer, where he sketched some communal preparations for war, many hundreds of miles from the battlefields.

His wife's records were, as often before, more consistent. During a brief visit to Boston in late January 1861 she bought a diary, and set to work to keep a really daily record. This book, in which she wrote entries for slightly more than half of the days of that year, came later into the possession of her son Julian, and is preserved, with many of his papers, in the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. For 1862 she bought a new book, and kept a more complete record of that year; there are substantial entries for 350 days. This second Civil War diary, which is here published for the first time, became the property of her daughter Rose, who used it in the closing part of her Memories of Hawthorne, but only in a selective and fragmentary way. In 1980 this book, along with many letters from the 1860s by Mrs. Hawthorne, and a few by her daughters, became part of the manuscript collection of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. It is by the kind permission of the Morgan Library, and the generous assistance of its curator of manuscripts, Herbert Cahoon, that we are able to publish the diary, and to make use of the related letters in our notes.

While it is natural that one's first curiosity about this diary should be for what it tells us about Nathaniel Hawthorne's life and writing, there is much else of interest. Hawthorne seems to have spent most of his time in his tower study at the Wayside, more or less detached from—but probably very much aware of—the many comings and goings of the rest of the household. Una, at eighteen years old, and Rose, at eleven, did not attend formal schools, but took lessons in art and music and languages with other girls of their ages, at home and in the several other intellectually alert residences of Concord. Julian was sixteen years old and trying to catch up with those boys who were like him preparing to enter Harvard in two years. He attended the famous experimental school conducted by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn in the center of the village.

Julian Hawthorne wrote an essay, “Hawthorne's Last Years,” for a centenary celebration of his father's birth. “Concord,” he recalled, “in those days, was after all a homely old place, and the folks were hospitable. Here were the cordial Manns and Aunt Lizzie Peabody, and Mr. Bull, the grape-grower, and the benign light of Emerson's countenance, and white-locked, orphic Mr. Alcott, blinking as though dazzled by the light of his own inspiration; and hook-nosed, bearded, stealthy Thoreau, and Ellery Channing, stalking in, downcast and elusive, but with a substantial man inside, could you but catch him; and Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, with his lovely, spiritual sister; and other kindly people.” Many of these names had achieved legendary dimensions by 1904, but Julian's recollections correspond pretty closely with the data in his mother's diary. The Emerson and Hoar children have their place, along with youngsters from such other prominent Concord families as the Bartletts and the Keyeses, and the offspring of Bostonians who boarded with Sanborn, the Higginsons and Stearnses and Wards. Julian's three teenaged cousins, the sons of Mary Mann, are quite important, as is his less glamorous cousin Ellen Peabody, who had married a young man of Concord, George Phineas How, and was as much a neighbor as the widowed Mrs. Mann.

Sophia Hawthorne's relations with her sisters Mary and Elizabeth, always a source of information about her husband and children, were particularly interesting in 1862. Throughout the previous decade the abolition of slavery had been a point of frustration and contention among them, with both Elizabeth in Boston and Mary as wife of the president of Antioch College in Ohio following the struggles of Sumner and Garrison and even John Brown with devoted admiration, while the Hawthornes, indebted to the proslavery politics of Franklin Pierce for their opportunity to spend seven years in Europe, wished the American social upheaval were only an unpleasant dream. By 1860 the sisters were close together again, Mary bringing her sons to Concord immediately after her husband's death, and the Hawthornes returning to the Wayside. Elizabeth travelled considerably, but kept a residence in Boston, and came to stay at Mary's for holidays and vacations. Now the war brought them together emotionally and spiritually, since the fervor of patriotism transcended dissension over the timing and tactics of emancipation. They all welcomed—apparently including Hawthorne himself—Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, announced finally on New Year's Day of 1863.

For Nathaniel Hawthorne probably the most important new acquaintances of the year 1862 were Edward Dicey, the British journalist, and Rebecca Harding, the novelist from Wheeling, West Virginia. For Sophia, Ethan Allen Hitchcock, a soldier turned philosopher and Transcendental psychologist, held the same role. He, like Dicey and Harding, came to Concord during the summer, at the invitation of Mary Mann, who had first discovered his books. He came soon to feel, his diary reveals, the unique intensity of Sophia's appreciation.

The other people outside of Concord most important to her were her husband's publishers, James and Annie Fields, and William D. Ticknor. Ticknor was Hawthorne's indispensable companion for his month in the South in March and April. Mrs. Fields is certainly Sophia's most frequent correspondent, her hostess in Boston, hostess also to Una and Julian, and to Nathaniel. James T. Fields, in addition to entertaining each member of the family in the most appropriate manner, provided costumes for parties and winter clothing or spending money if needed. He also gave books. The Hawthornes were already receiving each volume as it appeared of the new Ticknor & Fields edition of the Waverley novels of Sir Walter Scott, and in both 1861 and 1862 diaries her most frequent mention of “my husband” is for reading aloud in winter evenings from these: ten titles during the first year, and five more in 1862. Judging from the books the diary records Sophia as reading, Fields provided a copy of each new publication of the firm that might interest one of the Hawthornes. This was in response to Sophia's letter to Annie of 21 January 1861 about the depression that came on Hawthorne from the lack of variety and size of his library: “He is really getting demoralized you perceive.” Nathaniel read a few of the ensuing flood of books, but she read them all, and also the Atlantic Monthly, edited by Fields, from cover to cover.

She also followed closely in the newspapers the military progress of the war, hoping in vain, as were many Northerners, for the decisive victory that would give an early end to the conflict. The same sharp interest can be detected in her husband's writing of 1862—of course in his reports on his journey to the war zone, “Chiefly about War-Matters” and “Northern Volunteers: From a Journal”—but also in his papers on England for the Atlantic, and his fiction about Concord during the Revolution, “Septimius Felton” and “Septimius Norton.” …