Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: A Life, Volume 2, 1848-1871. By Patricia Dunlavy Valenti, Columbia, Mo: U of Missouri P, 2015. 545 pp. $39.95 cloth. Patricia Valenti's well-researched and deeply sympathetic Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, a Life, Volume 2, 1848-1871 actually opens in the summer of 1845, when the Hawthornes were facing eviction from the Old Manse in Concord for non-payment of rent. To explain why Sophia nonetheless rejoiced in her domestic life, Valenti appropriates Emerson's tribute to Sophia's artistic talents: she had a "beauty making eye." The phrase recurs during Valenti's anatomizations of Sophia's achievements and travails as wife, mother, sister, daughter, friend, editor, widow and artist. Not all of Valenti's assessments are laudatory. But she provides an admirably full understanding of a remarkably complex woman. Though the Hawthornes' financial problems remain central during the first chapter and recur throughout the narrative, the spotlight soon shifts to Sophia's self-confident parenting. Her children's primary foods were rice and potatoes, they drank water and milk, never had meat, sweets, or fats, had regular "airbaths," never experienced corporal punishment, were assumed to be morally good, and (like their parents) received only homeopathic treatments for illnesses. So certain was Sophia about the correctness of her regimen that she tried to convince her sister Mary to emulate it. More objectionably, she tried to force her own racism on Mary, who was then housing a free young black girl who was a student at a nearby school. As Valenti nonetheless shows, the two sisters overcame their recurrent differences (as they had done before and would do again) to offer one another emotional support and practical help. That was also true of Sophia's many disagreements with her sister Elizabeth. Moreover, if Sophia could be morally imperious, she could also be remarkably selfless. A clear example occurred near the end of the Hawthornes' years in Salem when they were sharing a house with Nathaniel's mother and two sisters. When her mother-in-law became mortally ill and no one else could nurse her, Sophia devotedly accepted the task. During this grief-filled period, Julian Hawthorne was born. Hawthorne published the collection of stories entitled Mosses from an Old Manse and, while he was coping with his devastating ouster as surveyor of the Salem Custom House, he was also striving to complete what would become his first novel--The Scarlet Letter. Meantime his devoted wife could pride herself on helping to pay the family's bills. Not only had she managed to save some of her husband's custom house earnings, but she diligently used her artistic skills to produce beautifully decorated lampshades, handscreens, and illustrated books. The work was exhausting, and commissions soon lapsed. By then, however, The Scarlet Letter was published, to wide critical acclaim. The Hawthornes' subsequent search for a suitable residence outside Salem ended when they were offered a small farmhouse in Lenox, owned by Sophia's old friend, Caroline Tappan. With impressive narrative skill, Valenti expatiates on the Hawthornes' numerous like-minded but much wealthier neighbors in the Berkshires, many of them linked by marriage or consanguinity. That skill is also evident in her summaries of the entwined lives of many of the women artists the Hawthornes met in Rome, and in her delineations of the ties of friendship and family among the many abolitionists who were the Hawthornes' Concord neighbors. The Hawthornes' relative ease during their Lenox years was both cause and consequence of Hawthorne's steady literary productivity and the income it produced. Fields happily published The House of the Seven Gables as well as three volumes of his stories, two of them collections of stories for children. Meanwhile, friends and family members were frequent house guests, and Rose Hawthorne was born. …