Anne Marion Forrester

"Of all these queries perhaps the easiest one to answer is that of the narrator's identity. Annie's companion/abductor is Hawthome himself. Aside from the fact that within the tale he unequivocally calis attention to his identity as a writer, his contemporaries took this fact for granted on account of one of the aut- hor's identifying marks, his smile. Annie is admittedly charmed by the narrator's smile, and that is precisely the reputation Hawthome had among family and friends. Also, Sketches in the nineteenth century were often presented by a narrator who was assumed by the readers to be the author himself. For instance, Robert Cantwell believed that «"Little Annie's Ramble" is a story of Hawthor- ne and Anne Marión Forrester, the child of Charlotte Story and John Forrester.»

(Cantwell, 1948: 137). All this consensus seems to settle the matter. "

"He (Nathaniel Hawthorn) sought out, for as yet he had no children, his little cousin (Annie) Forrester and led her by the hand from street to street through ancient precincts of the town descanting as they went on the scenes those beetling gabled domiciles had witnessed and drinking in with breathless zest the comments of his youthful charge."

from The proceedings in commemoration of the one hundredth anniversary of the ... By Robert S Rantoul,  Essex Institute

Essex Institute Historical Collections, Salem, Mass, 1935, Vol. 71, p. 53