American Literary Couple Reunited After 150 Years

One of the most passionate couples in American literary history were reunited yesterday when the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the author of The Scarlet Letter, was laid to rest alongside him in New Hampshire after an extended British detour lasting nearly 150 years.

The remains of Sophia Hawthorne and one of the couple's children, Una, were driven through Concord, their home town, in a horse-driven 19th-century hearse which was almost certainly used for her husband's funeral in 1864, to the town's Sleepy Hollow cemetery.

After she became a widow, Sophia Hawthorne moved to Europe to pursue her children's education. Both she and Una died in London and were buried in Kensal Green cemetery in north-west London, where they remained undisturbed until a hawthorn tree planted above the graves fell on them last year.

After seeing the damage, an order of nuns founded by one of the Hawthornes' daughters decided to interpret the incident as a sign that it was time to bring the family back together.

"As we were talking, all of us who had visited Concord remembered that there was a plot for them there," one of the nuns, Sister Mary de Paul, said yesterday.

The plot was on "Authors Ridge" in the Sleepy Hollow cemetery, where other writers from America's literary pantheon - Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louisa May Alcott - are buried.

Nathaniel Hawthorne is best known for his romantic novels, The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun, and for his short stories. Sophia Peabody (her maiden name) was an artist in her own right: a painter, who illustrated some of her husband's books, and a writer whose works are now attracting greater scrutiny.

She and her two siblings are the subject of a biography published last year, The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism. Megan Marshall, its author who was in Concord yesterday, said of Sophia: "She was an instinctive romantic.

"Well before Thoreau, she wrote about feeling the pulse of the woods. It's wonderful that she is rising, literally, into our awareness."

The couple wrote a joint journal alternating entries. Until this year, only Nathaniel's contribution had been published, but a new book shows both sides of what Ms Marshall described as "a passionate document".

Their correspondence during a 22-year marriage is also filled with mutual admiration and longing.

"I once thought that no power on earth should ever induce me to live without thee, and especially thought an ocean should never roll between us," Sophia once wrote to her husband. The Atlantic did ultimately intervene, but that was belatedly put right yesterday.