Rappaccini's Daughter

About Rappaccini's Daughter

Hawthorne filters the garden through Giovanni's changing impressions, so beauty and evidence never settle into a comfortable agreement. Rival scientific claims further disturb his trust. The story asks readers to examine the possessiveness hidden in protection and the moral cost of treating a human being as either an experiment or an ideal.

Reading focus

Enter a garden romance where attraction, scientific ambition, and uncertain perception make trust increasingly difficult.

This reading edition contains 11,385 words in 1 original section. Read the text online with adjustable type and three colour themes, or keep a printable PDF.

Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne. Language: English. Reading edition: 28 October 2026.

Opening excerpt

A young man, named Giovanni Guasconti, came, very long ago, from the more southern region of Italy, to pursue his studies at the University of Padua. Giovanni, who had but a scanty supply of gold ducats in his pocket, took lodgings in a high and gloomy chamber of an old edifice which looked not unworthy to have been the palace of a Paduan noble, and which, in fact, exhibited over its entrance the armorial bearings of a family long since extinct. The young stranger, who was not unstudied in the great poem of his country, recollected that one of the ancestors of this family, and perhaps an occupant of this very mansion, had been pictured by Dante as a partaker of the immortal agonies of his…

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