Hester Prynne in Hawthorns The Scarlet Letter (1850) is a sinner against Gods law and a breaker of the moral system of the seventeenth-century Puritan Boston. She commits a sin of adultery with the reverend young minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, who, unlike Hester, conceals his sin from the community. Therefore, she is punished first by being put in prison and then by being publicly displayed on a scaffold for three hours and forced to wear a lifetime scarlet letter A on the breast of her dress as a token of shame. It is expected, after her final release from prison, that the Bostonians will tolerate her, accept her as an ordinary person in their community, and give her an opportunity to start a new life. But what happens later is contrary to expectations. The aim of this paper is to shed some light on how her fellow-citizens, in particular, and people from other places, in general, sin against her more than she against them, and on how she pays for her guilt more than really deserves. It is not the intention of this short paper to cover all the incidents in the novel, but only a certain number of those that are as expressive of the aim of this paper as possible have been selected.