Author and Wife Reunited in Death [audio 6min @06:18]

The American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter, is to be reunited with his wife, Sophie, after more than 130 years. The Hawthorne plot in Kensal Green Cemetery where Sophie and their daughter Una were buried was being destroyed by the roots of a Hawthorne tree. On hearing news of the disrepair, the family decided that Sophie and Nathaniel should be together. At dawn on June 1st their bodies were exhumed and sent to America, where they will join Nathaniel Hawthorne in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts, on June 26. Mark Lawson goes to Kensal Green cemetery to meet the Superintendent of the cemetery, Safik Meah, and talks to one of the organisers of the move, Sister Mary de Paul of the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, who were founded by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daughter Rose.