Burials, Symbols and Doubt

London’s Highgate Cemetery is the resting place of many famous people including Karl Marx, George Eliot and Christina Rossetti. It is a park, a forest, and a maze, high up on a hill, an eccentric sprawling world of its own even though it is in an elegant London neighbourhood.

Bestselling American writer and artist Audrey Niffenegger first visited in the mid-1990s and found it wonderfully theatrical and moving. Years later, when she was inspired to set a novel in a cemetery, she decided that Her Fearful Symmetry had to be set in Highgate.

She is joined by broadcasters John Waite and Judith Kampfner who both have family graves at Highgate. John has been closely associated with Highgate for nearly 30 years while Judith has come to know it more recently. Both are proud to have loved ones resting in a place where there is a clear mission for tolerance and acceptance of people of all faiths and no faith.

Audrey explains how the cemetery became a character in her novel and how it allowed her to take her plot to wild extremes. Her book explores grief and memory and letting go, and she appreciates the way the Victorians accepted death and even celebrated it. She also likes the way that Highgate is different from a modern cemetery. Though a lapsed Catholic who does not believe in an afterlife, Audrey traps a dead character in a supernatural world between life and death and admits that she is still fascinated by Christian iconography and the Gothic and Egyptian symbols that commemorate the dead in Highgate.

(Photo: Audrey Niffenegger in Highgate Cemetery. Credit: Jon Calver)