In Memoriam: Joan Hawthorne Deming Howe Ensor and Rosamond Hawthorne Mikkelsen

Abstract

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Hawthornes may or may not have been a "remarkably 'hardheaded' race," as Julian Hawthorne wrote in his biography of his parents, but the Hawthornes born in the twentieth century can certainly be said to have been long-lived. Two great-granddaughters of Sophia and Nathaniel, Rosamond Hawthorne Mikkelsen and Joan Hawthorne Deming Howe Ensor, cousins and lifelong residents of Redding, Connecticut, died this year, six months apart, on January 4 and June 9, 2016, at ages 104 and 103. The two were the last surviving members of their generation in their branch of the Hawthorne family. I first met Joan Ensor in the mid-1980s when she responded to a notice I'd placed in the New York Times Book Review asking for research leads as I began work on my biography of the Peabody sisters. Joan invited me to her house in Redding to show me Sophia's two oil paintings of Lake Como, done for Nathaniel as engagement presents. These hung in Joan's living room by the fireplace, though they are now, thanks to her generous gift, on permanent display at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. Like her Peabody great-grandmother and aunts, Joan was a small woman, blue-eyed, warm-hearted (I was just one of many researchers welcomed into her home for a viewing of the Comos), and very smart. We spoke easily and began a friendship that spanned nearly three decades, conducted mostly through the mail. First Joan and her older daughter, Imogen Howe, sent further research leads. Would I be interested in Sophia's inscription to Nathaniel on the flyleaf of their book of Wordsworth's poetry (Sophia's first engagement gift to Nathaniel)? Indeed. Ebe Hawthorne's Spanish dictionary? Certainly! (The volume can be viewed now at the Concord Free Public Library, William Munroe Special Collections, along with the Hawthornes' 1837 Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Henry Reed, ed., both cleaned and handsomely restored.) But Joan's greatest gift to me was understanding. She knew my infrequent visits had to be coordinated with my own older daughter's traveling soccer team's tournament schedule, which occasionally brought us to Farmington or Avon, near enough to reach Redding for a morning or afternoon. Joan always asked about my daughter in letters, and sympathized with the difficulties of being a writing soccer-mom. She was in her seventies at our first meeting, and as my work on the book stretched into a second decade, I began to worry that, healthy as she always appeared to be, Joan might not live to see the result of the labors she had encouraged for so long. I took a chance and sent her a draft of a chapter I'd written on Sophia Peabody's girlhood. Joan's astute and reassuring letter in response boosted my confidence at a time when my publisher seemed to have lost interest, and after that she was my first reader on every chapter. It would not be wrong to say that I wrote, or finished, The Peabody Sisters for Joan Ensor. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I knew Joan's cousin Rosamond, called "Rosy" by her family, less well, though I also met her because of a painting. Joan and Imogen drove me to Rosamond's house just a mile away, the same house in which she'd grown up, to see Chester Harding's 1830 portrait of Sophia Peabody, hanging then on a brick wall in a sunny back room. (The portrait was willed to the Peabody Essex Museum, where it will soon join the Charles Osgood portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne on permanent exhibition.) A portrait of Rosamond in her late twenties by the artist Rosamond Tudor, mother of the children's book author and illustrator Tasha Tudor, shows her to have been a slender beauty, with the black hair of her great-grandfather and his sister Ebe. She was also immensely capable, a painter herself and jack-of-all house trades. She had designed and supervised the construction of the extension to her house in which we sat to view Sophia's portrait; she'd landscaped the surrounding gardens, installing terraces and digging a pond on the property. …