Nathaniel Hawthorne begins his preface to The House of the Seven Gables (1851) by distinguishing between the novel and the romance: when an author calls his book a romance, as Hawthorne has, he “wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume, had he professed to be writing a Novel.” He wants us to treat as pure invention his cursed New England house as well as the old Puritan Pyncheons who guiltily live there: “the Author … trusts not to be considered as unpardonably offending, by laying out a street that infringes upon nobody's private rights, and appropriating a lot of land which had no visible owner, and building a house out of materials long in use for constructing castles in the air.” What I want to suggest in this chapter, though, is that novelistic setting always collapses the boundaries between the realistic and romantic: to write a place is to imagine a place, to call a new place into being around even an old signpost.