Hawthorne family finally reunited

It was a Hawthorne family reunion -- for the dead and the living.

About 40 descendants of Nathaniel Hawthorne gathered in Concord on Monday to watch as the remains of the author’s wife and daughter, which have been buried for more than a century in England, were interred in the family plot at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery alongside fellow influential American writers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

“It’s greatly significant to see the family reunited,” said Alison Hawthorne Deming, 59, of Tucson, Ariz., Hawthorne’s great-great-granddaughter.

“It’s also great to get together different parts of the heritage. It’s a beautiful celebration for us,” said Deming, a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona. “It’s not something we imagined happening. These people have never all been together.”

Hawthorne, author of “The Scarlet Letter” and “The House of the Seven Gables,” died in New Hampshire in 1864. His wife, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, moved to England with their three children and died there six years later. She and their daughter Una were buried at Kensal Green cemetery in London.

Hawthorne’s daughter Rose returned to the United States and started a Catholic order dedicated to caring for cancer patients. The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, based in Hawthorne, N.Y., had paid to maintain the Hawthorne graves in England. But when cemetery officials told the nuns that the grave site needed costly repairs, the order arranged to return the remains to Concord.

On Monday, one modern casket containing the remains of mother and daughter was put on a horse-drawn, 1860 wooden hearse and carried from a local funeral home through the town center to First Parish Church, a Universalist Unitarian church where Nathaniel Hawthorne’s funeral service was held.

The procession, led by police escort and two park rangers holding U.S. and British flags, included about 40 direct descendants and a group of Dominican Sisters.

Hawthorne historians say the author and his wife shared a passionate relationship. Many see Sophia’s independence in Hawthorne’s characters, including Hester Prynne, who is shunned by puritanical villagers in “The Scarlet Letter” for having an affair and an out-of-wedlock child.

Philip McFarland, 76, who wrote a book called “Hawthorne in Concord,” watched the procession with his wife, Patricia, from the Concord common. He said much of what is known of the Hawthornes’ relationship came from about 1,500 letters written by Sophia.

“It was a great love story,” he said. “It was one of the premier marriages in American literature.”