The Novel She Absolutely Hated

A Poetry Tale about Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, told by Hello Doggo.

In the summer of eighteen thirty-six, in the Swiss town of Thun, a young American widower called Henry Wadsworth Longfellow met a Boston heiress named Fanny Appleton. They went walking. They talked about books. They studied German together.

He fell in love. She did not.

So he did what any poet would do. He put her in a novel.

Hyperion came out in eighteen thirty-nine. Its hero, Paul Flemming, is a sensitive young traveller with a broken heart. He falls for a clever young woman called Mary Ashburton, who turns him down. Boston society did not need a key.

Fanny got her copy. And in a letter she called it “desultory, objectless, a thing of shreds and patches like the author’s mind.”

She allowed there were some exquisite things in it. She also noted that the hero was evidently himself.

Then she went frosty. For years.

Now, Boston legend has him walking from Cambridge, over the river, to her door on Beacon Street, again and again, for the best part of seven years. The bridge on that spot is called the Longfellow Bridge today. Historians aren’t convinced he made the walk all that often.

What’s certain is this. In May eighteen forty-three, quite suddenly, she said yes. Nobody really knows why. They married that July.

Decades later he wrote The Sound of the Sea, a sonnet about inspirations that seem to come from nowhere — from somewhere, as he put it, “beyond our reason or control.”

Which is still the best explanation anyone’s got for Fanny Appleton’s change of heart.