Mary Moody Research Articles

The Selected Letters of Mary Moody Emerson

Scholars have long recognized that Mary Moody (1774-1863) had a vital influence on the intellectual development of her nephew, Ralph Waldo Emerson, during his most formative years. extent of that influence--and the quality of Mary Emerson's own mind--are apparent, however, only through her extensive correspondence spanning seventy years.The Selected Letters of Mary Moody Emerson makes available for the first time this important collection of letters within the family papers and firmly establishes Mary as a woman of strong and independent mind. Moreover, as himself realized, his aunt's letters reveal much about the political, social, and religious concerns that dominated her age--the critical from the American Revolution to the Civil War. Mary rejoiced in what she called a period of wonderfull revolutions and through her correspondence engaged actively in the disputes of the time. During these years the new Constitution was tried and tested, most severely by slavery and the Civil War but also by the War of 1812, the rapid expansion westward, and the increasingly materialistic and capitalistic pursuits of the American people.These letters contain wide references to the people, events, and controversies of the period. They also reveal the impact of changing conditions on an individual woman--a woman of curiosity and self-reliance who sought to define herself in a patriarchal culture. Ralph Waldo once commented that in her prime Mary was the best writer in New England. letter became her art form, and she managed to transform it into a vehicle for free discussion. Her many correspondents--fifty-five in all--included her nephews William, Waldo, Edward, and Charles, as well as Charles's fiancee, Elizabeth Hoar, and Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley.For this edition, Nancy Simmons has chosen some 333 letters that represent the contours of Mary Emerson's life and thought. A valuable contribution to literary, historical, religious, and feminist scholarship, The Selected Letters of Mary Moody Emerson recovers from the footnotes of literary history a woman of considerable intellectual influence.

The selected letters of Mary Moody Emerson

The selected letters of Mary Moody Emerson

Abolition, the Emersons, and 1837

EMERSON'S first antislavery speech was delivered late in November 1837. It was his first public statement on a social problem which had by then reached near crisis proportions and one which he had managed studiously to avoid. The excerpts from the speech which appear in Cabot's Memoir, the only known source, suggest the high level of ambiguity which characterized Emerson's thinking on the subject at that time. His major concern was not so much the evil of slavery as the preservation of the principle of free speech which was threatened by an almost universal repression of abolition oratory. Emerson's comments regarding the actual problem of slavery were limited to an exhortation to his audience to be mindful of immediate moral problems as well as the remote sin of slavery, but he also called a sympathetic understanding of the slaveholder and his plight. The entire performance was a severe disappointment to the abolitionists, who had waited so long Emerson to speak out against what they believed to be America's foremost social evil. It was undoubtedly a frustrating experience Emerson as well, and despite the consistent prodding of some of his closest relations and friends, he would not return to the issue seven years. The plight of blacks had long concerned the Emerson family. Emerson's father, William, despite his modest income, had helped to maintain the Smith School in Boston, which provided free education for colored children of both sexes, from 1798 until his death in 18i .1 Mary Moody Emerson, William's colorful and somewhat eccentric sister, and the Reverend Ezra Ripley, his stepfather and probably Concord's most distinguished clergyman, were prominently involved in

Mary Moody Emerson: The Gadfly of Concord

MARY MOODY EMERSON was one of those women whom we can never imagine except in old age, and who in old age, when the alternative possibilities of youth have long ago disappeared, often seem to their contemporaries to be embodiments of a vanished way of life. It was as an extraordinary manifestation of the primitive American character, at a time when that character was rapidly receding into the past, that she appeared to her nephew, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson, upon whom her influence was profound, thought her life a representative one which could have been lived nowhere but in New England, a life of which he thought no other examples survived. Men of genius-Henry Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, and her nephew-called her a genius, the most gifted woman of their acquaintance, the best writer in Massachusetts; the younger Henry James, who knew her only by reputation, felt that she would have inspired a novelist.' Though poverty and obscurity were her lot, she was an aristocrat, very proud of her descent from six generations of ministers, the ruling caste of New England. She was born on August 25, 1774, at Concord, where she spent most of her life. Her father, the Rev. William Emerson, an eloquent preacher and lover of literature,2 was a patriotic Revolutionary minister who fought at Ticonderoga and died in 1776 of army fever. He was a man so glorious in her eyes that she once sharply rebuked Ralph Waldo for being more stirred by Caesar and Cicero

Emerson and East-West Synthesis

SOME SIXTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, OLIVER WENdell Holmes pointed out the Men of Letters series' that Emerson was American in aspect, temperament, way of thinking, and feeling. As if to check himself, he added immediately: American, with an atmosphere of Oriental idealism. Indeed, this qualification could not very well have been left out any just appraisal of the great poet and seer. Nearly all biographers of Emerson have noted his Oriental leanings, among them his son Edward Waldo, Moncure Daniel Conway, James Elliot Cabot, and George Willis Cooke. Some have discussed detail Emerson's literary relations with the Orient, notably Protap Chunder Mozoomdar, William Torrey Harris, George Williamson, Frederick Ives Carpenter, and Arthur Christy. A good deal of romanticism has been entertained the writings of others not mentioned. Nevertheless, there are few who would not concur claiming an Oriental side to Emerson's character, however vaguely it might have been defined. A perusal of Emerson's essays, lectures, poems, his journals as edited by E. W. Emerson and W. E. Forbes, his letters published by Ralph L. Rusk and others, and the list of books he studied, as compiled by his editors as well as Harold Clarke Goddard, Arthur Christy, Kenneth Walter Cameron, and others, will convince anyone that the words of his professor of Greek at Harvard, All tends to the mysterious East,2 served Emerson as a guide, and that the admonitions of his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, to study the Orientals did not fall on deaf ears.