Interestingly, in the interview at BookBrowse, Hillary says she didn't set out to write a version of The Scarlet Letter - the similarities only came to her during the writing: http://www.bookbrowse.com/reading_guides/detail/index.cfm/book_number/2625/when-she-woke....
The original story fragment of When She Woke centered on a young woman who'd been turned red as punishment for murdering her sister's abusive husband. At first (and unbelievably to me now) I didn't make the connection between my stigmatized heroine and Hawthorne's. And then one day Hester Prynne and her scarlet A popped into my mind, and I thought, Huh, I should reread that book. And I did, that very afternoon, for the first time since high school, and it sparked all sorts of interesting connections and ideas. Hester is made to stand on a scaffold in front of the whole community and exhibit the mark of her shame. So what, I asked myself, would the futuristic equivalent of a scaffold be? Reality TV, of course, only in a more sinister form. Hester is impregnated by a charismatic clergyman, the analogue of which would be ... a megachurch preacher. And because of The Scarlet Letter, my future America ended up being not just cruel and repressive but also essentially a theocracy, as seventeenth-century Boston was. But while the beginning of When She Woke owes a lot to Hawthorne, the two story lines diverge sharply after that. I didn't adhere to The Scarlet Letter as much as riff on it. Which was a lot of fun because it's a book I truly love.