Book reviews

The Hollow of the Three Hills: the accusation has a soundtrack

An unseen room becomes vivid through its smallest noises. Hawthorne makes listening intimate while keeping the woman at the centre painfully hard to hear.

Whimsical Woes editorial ·

A clock, a fire, and the rattle of a window can furnish a room without showing it. In The Hollow of the Three Hills, Nathaniel Hawthorne makes an act of listening almost painfully visual. A woman wants news of people she has left behind. What she receives is vivid enough to feel present, but presence does not make the exchange fair. The voices describing her have far more room to speak than she does.

First published in 1830 and later collected in Twice-Told Tales, this is a short, concentrated work. A troubled younger woman meets an older woman in a secluded hollow. She asks about those from whom she is separated. To listen, she kneels with her face covered by the older woman's cloak. The setting is visible; the information she most wants will arrive without a view.

Let the small noises build the space

Hawthorne begins with an almost measured piece of landscape: three hills, a circular depression, dwarf pines, decaying wood, and stagnant water. The place feels bounded enough to hold the encounter. Against that enclosure, the first distant conversation opens another interior. Its occupants are recognisable through their voices, and its room becomes palpable through fire, embers, clock, and windows. The sound is domestic before the speech becomes an accusation.

That order matters. Ordinary noises lend the scene a life beyond its message. The listening woman cannot dismiss it as a conveniently delivered sentence about herself; the hearth seems to keep existing while people talk beside it. A horror artist working with sound could learn from that choice. Give the space a routine, then let the disturbing words belong to someone living inside it.

The transitions are just as important as the arrivals. Voices dissolve into wind among autumn leaves. A later tumult resolves into wind fighting the pine trees. The hollow repeatedly takes back the sound, leaving the listener in the same physical posture. Each apparent journey has happened while she remains kneeling, dependent on another person's control of the encounter.

Hearing everything is not being heard

The second sequence is much less orderly than the first. Laughter, singing, threats, chains, and grief crowd together in the institution the old woman identifies as a madhouse. A man tries to tell others about his injury, reading their reactions as sympathy or scorn. The sound does not sort neatly into one meaning. Yet his account of betrayal contributes to a mounting judgment of the absent woman.

She has spoken enough to establish need and distress, but she does not receive an equivalent space to explain what led to her separation. That imbalance is worth noticing even if one reads the tale as a direct moral warning. The older woman's pleased remarks make the listening increasingly feel like punishment administered as entertainment. The story's cruelty lies partly in who gets to decide when one account ends and another begins.

There are real limitations. The women are introduced through a blunt contrast between troubled beauty and grotesque age, while the institution is rendered through harsh period stereotypes of mental illness. Readers seeking a generous, developed account of either woman's life will not find it here. The narrative is powerful as an arrangement of sensations and voices, narrower as a distribution of human sympathy.

The final sequence sharpens the judgment; its particular news is better left for the story. Our Signal-Man review also considers a warning carried through sound, while The Eyes examines an account shaped by the person telling it. Hawthorne's hollow offers another problem: information can arrive with astonishing clarity while leaving the person most affected unable to answer. The room in the ear is beautifully made. Its tribunal is much harder to trust.

Questions from the crypt

When was The Hollow of the Three Hills published?

It appeared in the Salem Gazette in 1830 and was later included in Twice-Told Tales, first published as a collection in 1837. The linked complete English text identifies its 1851 collection edition. These dates distinguish the story's first appearance from later collected texts.

Why is sound so important in this story?

The younger woman listens with her face covered. Details such as a clock, a rattling window, fire, footsteps, and voices make distant spaces imaginable without a visible journey. Wind then reconnects those encounters to the hollow where she remains.

Is this a useful starting point for readers who dislike long Gothic prose?

Its action is brief and concentrated, so it requires less commitment than a Gothic novel. The diction is still nineteenth-century and deliberately ornate. Readers should also expect bereavement, accusations about family obligations, and an institutional scene with dated, demeaning mental-illness imagery.

Sources & further reading

Keep reading