1 - The Legacy of The Scarlet Letter: Hawthorne in Contemporary Culture

Summary

On June 22, 2006, an illustrated invitation arrived via email. It showed two women, one with a high starched collar and white bow, the other in the foreground, a nun, her face shrouded in a nun's habit in all of its whiteness with the black wimple curtaining it. The invitation read:

Public Ceremony

2:30 PM on June 26, 2006 at

The Old Manse

269 Monument Street

Concord, Massachusetts

Followed by

Reception & Refreshments

Graveside Visitation after 3 PM

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery — Author's Ridge

Hosted by

The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne

And

The Help of the Good People of Concord

Preceding pages offered oval portraits of Sophia, Una, and Nathaniel Hawthorne to honor the memory of Sophia, Hawthorne's wife, and Una, their older daughter, “on the historic day of their re-interment alongside Nathaniel Hawthorne.” Their original graves in Kensal Green Cemetery, the oldest English cemetery still in operation in London, had fallen into disrepair over the years when a hawthorn tree, oddly enough, had fallen and damaged the original cemetery markers, knocking over Una's headstone. Sophia had been buried there in 1871 at sixty-two. Una had followed in 1877 at thirty-three. The Dominican nuns, a Catholic order established by Rose Hawthorne, Sophia and Nathaniel's younger daughter, to care for dying cancer patients in what was one of the first hospices of its kind, had taken care of the graves and had tried for many years to raise funds to move the remains to Concord. In 2003, Rose Hawthorne had been proposed as a candidate for sainthood.