The speaker of Sexton's poems dwells with husband and children in affluent, white Protestant America just after the death of JFK . . . More than a century earlier, Hawthorne had created in The Scarlet Letter a sexual female protagonist, Hester Prynne-to exhibit her leading a life of disgrace at the margins of the town because of her sin of adultery. In Sexton's New England the margins of town have been transformed into suburbia, and adultery looms as the next horizon of sexual destiny, once marriage and childbirth have ripened a woman's body and mapped her pleasure centers. In 1969 this was new; no woman had published such poems in English for centuries.-from the foreword by Diane Wood Middlebrook