Ellen Tucker Emerson
Portrait of Ellen Tucker Emerson.
Born on February 24, 1839, Ellen Tucker Emerson was Ralph Waldo and Lidian Emerson’s second child. At Lidian’s suggestion, Ellen was named after Emerson’s first wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker, who died of tuberculosis. In 1853, Ellen was sent to Mrs. Sedgwick’s School for Young Ladies in Lenox, Massachusetts, and subsequently attended the Agassiz School in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Frank Sanborn’s school in Concord.
Starting in her early teens, Ellen was an enthusiastic letter writer and told her father that her letters were her journal. Emerson encouraged his family and acquaintances to keep journals, as he did for most of his life. Fortunately, many of Ellen’s letters have been saved, providing insight into family life. As the eldest daughter, she understood her role in helping her parents. On leaving the Sedgwick School she wrote, “I am going home to keep house and give Mother rest, I think it is just like going different roads.”
Living her entire life in the Emerson home on the Cambridge Turnpike, Ellen was very active in Concord’s community. She taught Sunday School at the First Parish Church for more than 40 years; was the first woman elected to Concord’s School Committee; and organized many of the town’s social events. Always close to her sister Edith and brother Edward, Ellen provided Edith with welcome support at each of her eight childbirths.
Ellen traveled the world with her father on his lecture tours and as he aged, helped him to ensure he didn’t lose his place while speaking. She also assisted author and philosopher James Elliot Cabot—who was Emerson’s literary executor—with his biography of her father, A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Additionally, she wrote a biography of her mother, The Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson. Lidian was often unwell and Ellen, by necessity, would manage the household herself.
In 1868, Ellen was sent to the Azores for a rest, staying on Faial with the family of John Bass Dabney—former U.S. Consul General to the Azores. She enjoyed the Azores and the Portuguese people immensely and her health returned. To her great pleasure, Ellen took many donkey rides around the islands—a common mode of transportation there. Later she was sent an Azorean donkey of her own as a gift. Ellen named the donkey “Gloriosa” and would occasionally ride her into town for errands.
In Concord, Ellen was surrounded by the 19th-century literary elite, including Henry David Thoreau and the Alcotts. In a letter home from the Azores in 1869, she wrote, “Little Women has been sent out to me and I am about to read it…I just lent it to the Dabney children and they enjoy it. Louisa has always been the most lively and original girl, and her three sisters were all bright and able to help in all her schemes, and their childhood and youth were full of the most amazing and interesting works and plays.”
Ellen passed away in 1909 at the age of 69. She was the last Emerson family member to live in the home on Concord’s Cambridge Turnpike. The Emerson House is now owned and managed as a museum by the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association (RWEMA), a nonprofit organization founded and maintained by Emerson descendants.
— B. Ewen, Emerson House guide
