Most everyone who’s ever taken a serious English literature course has read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s historical-fiction novel The Scarlet Letter.

Published in 1850, but set more than 200 years earlier, in the 1640s, it tells the story of one Hester Prynne, a young woman in Puritan-era Boston who conceives a daughter as a result of an extramarital affair. The punishment for her scandalous behavior is to be publicly stigmatized by being required to wear a scarlet “A” — for adultery — on her dress.