Introduction and Notes by Henry Claridge; Senior Lecturer; School of English; University of Kent at Canterbury. This is a troubling story of crime; sin; guilt; punishment and expiation; set in the rigid moral climate of 17th-century New England. The young mother of an illegitimate child confronts her Puritan judges. However; it is not so much her harsh sentence; but the cruelties of slowly exposed guilt as her lover is revealed; that hold the reader enthralled all the way to the book's poignant climax.