Una Hawthorne (1844 - 1877). Eldest child of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody. They named her after a character in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene.
In 1867 she became engaged to Storrow Higginson, a nephew to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, but the marriage was called off for reasons which remain unclear. When her younger sister Rose Hawthorne married, in 1871, she reportedly became depressed. A later potential husband, Albert Webster, died at sea. She lived with her brother Julian Hawthorne in England, where she died in 1877.
Scholars speculate that Una inspired the character of Pearl in The Scarlet Letter, published seven years after her birth (she was never allowed to read the novel).
- "In your reply, on no account say a word about the red hair." https://books.google.it/books?id=WMcWNa6k_psC&pg=PA113...
- "... Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who described "her superb Titianesque coloring. . .the abundant hair of reddish auburn and the large gray eyes". http://hawthornessevengables.com/chapters/una-hawthorne.html
- "Una, with the sunny hair, was eight years of age, the eldest of three children... Baby Rose, appropriately nicknamed Rosebud, was a jolly, pink-cheeked, blue-eyed toddler, with the same red-gold hair that her sister possessed." http://www.hawthorneinsalem.org/mirror_eldritch/wayha.html
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| Una and her brother Jullian |
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