Ellen Louisa Tucker

Ellen Louisa Tucker Emerson, courtesy of the New England Historical Society.

On September 30, 1829, Ralph Waldo Emerson married Ellen Louisa Tucker. They had met two years earlier when he was preaching in Concord, New Hampshire, and fell deeply in love. Ellen was 16 when they met and Emerson was 24; she was beautiful, wrote poetry and had a strong appreciation for nature. Unfortunately, she also had tuberculosis. Shortly after their engagement in December 1828, Emerson wrote: “I have now been four days engaged to Ellen Louisa Tucker. Will my Father in Heaven regard us with kindness, and as he hath, as we trust, made us for each other, will he be pleased to strengthen and purify and prosper and eternize our affection!”

After their wedding, Emerson and Ellen moved to Boston, where Emerson had accepted an offer to serve as minister at Boston’s Second Church. Sadly, Ellen’s health declined rapidly and she died in Boston on February 8, 1831. Ellen is buried in Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with the Tuckers. 

Emerson wrote after her death: “Will the eye that was closed on Tuesday ever beam again in the fullness of love on me? Shall I ever be able to connect the face of outward nature, the mists of the morn, the star of eve, the flowers and all poetry with the heart and life of an enchanting friend? No. There is one birth and baptism and one first love and the affections cannot keep their youth any more than men.” 

In 1835, Emerson married Lydia “Lidian” Jackson, his wife for 47 years and the mother of his four children. 

— B. Ewen, Emerson House guide