THE American literary giant Nathaniel Hawthorne, the author of The Scarlet Letter, is to be reunited with his wife after more than 130 years, after the excavation of her remains.

From an unkempt and crumbling plot in Kensal Green cemetery, northwest London, just after dawn yesterday, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne and the couple’s daughter, Una, were exhumed, sealed inside a zinc-lined coffin and sent on their way to America, where they will be reburied next to the 19th-century author in a ceremony on June 26.

Inseparable and deeply in love during their 22-year marriage, the Hawthornes found themselves more than 3,000 miles apart in death — a separation that their American descendants decided had to end.

“It was a wonderfully happy marriage and they never wanted to be separated — his letters were full of longing when they were — and this is very fitting after the two being apart for so long,” Joan Deming Ensor, 93, one of the Hawthornes’ four surviving great-grandchildren, told The Times.

Hawthorne, best known for his short stories and the four romances that he wrote between 1850 and 1860, including The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables, died on May 19, 1864, of suspected stomach cancer. He was buried in the family plot in Sleepy Hollow cemetery in Concord, New Hampshire.

After his death Sophia and their three children, Rose, Una and Julian, moved to England. Hawthorne had been US consul in Liverpool in the 1850s.

Sophia died there in 1871 aged 62, and Una, who suffered from mental illness, died in 1877 at the age of 33. They were buried in Kensal Green, at the time England’s most fashionable cemetery, and the resting place for such 19th-century luminaries as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Charles Babbage and William Makepeace Thackeray.

Rose and Julian Hawthorne returned to the US. Julian served a jail term for embezzlement, but Rose scaled far loftier heights.

She married George Parsons Lathrop, converted to Roman Catholicism, and became a Dominican nun, founding the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne in New York State, an order dedicated to caring for cancer patients.

For more than a century the order has paid for the upkeep of the Hawthorne graves in London. But last year Safik Meah, the superintendent of Kensal Green cemetery, contacted the Dominican Sisters to tell them that the plot was in great disrepair. A Hawthorne tree, more than 100 years old, was on the verge of collapse and its roots were damaging the headstones.

Sister Mary de Paul, nursing director for the order, said: “Mr Meah sent us some pictures of the graves, and it was almost a sign that it was time to bring them back.”

Grave markers for Sophia and Una have been sitting on the US family plot for years. “We have a very close bond to the Hawthorne family,” Sister de Paul added. “We consider Nathaniel our grandfather and consider ourselves the daughters of Rose.”

The order put the idea to the Hawthorne descendants — Mrs Ensor, her two cousins, aged 95 and 91, and her brother, aged 97. “We had a family conflab and we all thought it was a splendid idea,” Mrs Ensor said. “We agreed and signed all the papers.”

A public ceremony is due to be held on June 26 at the Old Manse in Concord, where the Hawthornes once lived. Sophia and Una will be laid next to Nathaniel in Sleepy Hollow cemetery. They will lie in the cemetery’s Author’s Ridge, near the graves of two other great 19th-century American writers and philosophers, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

Travelled around Europe but died in New Hampshire in 1864. In a letter to poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow he wrote: “I have not lived, but only dreamed about living”

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