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Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism: A Family History
by
Phyllis Cole
Mary Moody Emerson has long been a New England legend, the "eccentric Calvinist aunt" of Ralph Waldo Emerson, wearing a death-shroud as her daily garment. This exciting new study, based on the first reading of all her known letters and diaries, reveals a complex human voice and powerful forerunner of American Transcendentalism. From the years of her famous nephew...more
Hardcover, 400 pages
Published
February 26th 1998
by Oxford University Press, USA
(first published January 14th 1998)
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Marshall
rated it
This is the biography of one of the most remarkable, quirky, eccentric, influential, under-appreciated women in American history. Mary Moody Emerson was Ralph Waldo Emerson's aunt. She influenced him in so many ways that it's difficult to discern how many of his ideas were his, how many he borrowed from Mary, and how many they worked out together. Waldo called her his muse. It's also very likely that she also gave Henry David Thoreau the idea for Walden. These two men in turn inspired thous...more
Clearly Ralph Waldo owed much of his intellectual up-bringing to his relentlessly inquisitive, critical and prodding aunt, an absolutely fascinating individual, whose existence outside of the New England of the early 19th century can hardly be imagined. She was a self-taught polymath, whose acquaintance with German idealism and Biblical criticism antedated that of transcendentalism's so-called founders. Without her unremitting and absolutely fearless inquiries into matters of religion and philo...more
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