Overview

Ellen Tucker Emerson and Edith Emerson Forbes, the daughters of Lidian Jackson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, grew up in the heart of Concord, Massachusetts’s famed literary community. In a culture that celebrated self-reliance, Ellen and Edith formed a partnership that only strengthened as their paths diverged, with Ellen remaining in the family home and Edith marrying William Forbes, moving to Milton, Massachusetts, and having eight children. The partnership allowed them to tend to the demands and opportunities created by their father’s career, including serving as his secretaries and editors, and helped them shape his posthumous image. It also enabled them to adapt to historical developments stretching from the Civil War to American imperialism as well as personal ones, including Edith’s growing family and travel and study abroad, and inevitable ones brought on by the aging processes of their parents and themselves. Emerson’s Daughters is a biography of a sisterhood, the first full-length study of Ellen’s and Edith’s lives. Building on archival research into the extensive correspondence between the sisters, it adds to the growing body of work on women’s contribution to Transcendentalism while opening a window onto the rich, and understudied, family life of the “Sage of Concord.”

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9781625348760

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"""In exhaustive detail, Emerson's Daughters traces the lives of these sisters and brilliantly succeeds in capturing the many roles that Edith and Ellen Emerson handled for their father, mother, brother, and extended family and friends. A tremendously important and detailed contribution to the study of Concord authors and the Emerson family.""--Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, coeditor of The Almanacks of Mary Moody Emerson: A Scholarly Digital Edition ""The inaugural book-length treatment of the lives of Ellen and Edith, Emerson's Daughters is a truly important study with impeccable research and careful prose that is well-timed for this moment in Emerson scholarship.""--Christopher Hanlon, author of Emerson's Memory Loss: Originality, Communality, and the Late Style"

“In exhaustive detail, Emerson’s Daughters traces the lives of these sisters and brilliantly succeeds in capturing the many roles that Edith and Ellen Emerson handled for their father, mother, brother, and extended family and friends. A tremendously important and detailed contribution to the study of Concord authors and the Emerson family.”—Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, coeditor of The Almanacks of Mary Moody Emerson: A Scholarly Digital Edition  “The inaugural book-length treatment of the lives of Ellen and Edith, Emerson’s Daughters is a truly important study with impeccable research and careful prose that is well-timed for this moment in Emerson scholarship.”—Christopher Hanlon, author of Emerson’s Memory Loss: Originality, Communality, and the Late Style

Author Information

Kate Culkin is professor of history at Bronx Community College. She is author of Harriet Hosmer: A Cultural Biography and an associate editor of the Harriet Jacobs Family Papers. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and outlets including New England Quarterly, New York Archives, and Gotham: A Blog for Scholars of New York City History.

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