Emerson’s Daughters
On July 18th of this year, Kate Culkin’s much-anticipated book, Emerson’s Daughters: Ellen Tucker Emerson, Edith Emerson Forbes, and Their Family Legacy, will be published. This “biography of a sisterhood,” the first full-length study of the lives of Lidian Jackson and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s daughters, was meticulously researched—including a number of visits by the author to the Emersons’ Concord home. It makes a welcome addition to the extensive collection of works by and about the Emerson family available in the Emerson House bookshop, where it will be a featured selection this season.
From the publisher:
This July, amidst the annual summer crowds flocking to the Concord house of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the University of Massachusetts Press will release Kate Culkin’s Emerson’s Daughters, a new dual biography of Ellen Tucker Emerson and Edith Emerson Forbes, the sisters who worked behind the scenes to shape the image of their famous father.
As part of an ongoing attempt to uncover women’s history, the book explores the significance of the Emerson daughters in their father’s success as a poet, philosopher, and Transcendentalist leader. As Culkin writes, “[Ralph Waldo Emerson’s] ability to express such ideas in print and tour the country to deliver them in person was dependent on his daughter’s labor as housekeepers, secretaries, accountants, and hostesses to the stream of visitors who came to speak to the ‘great man.’”
Emerson first called on his daughters for support in their adolescence, handing them the responsibility of running the house. As the girls grew older, they took on the duties of preserving family transcripts, contributing to their father’s writing, and, in Emerson’s later years, editing his work.
Although the two women made notable contributions to their father’s accomplishments, Culkin notes that “the significance of Ellen’s and Edith’s lives goes beyond the support they gave their famous father.” Emerson’s Daughters also examines the letters written by the women to one another, and the stories captured in their correspondence. Journal letters, detailed logs of their days, and business letters—evidence of a partnership—were sent by Ellen and Edith, capturing social and cultural history.
Culkin calls her work “a biography of correspondence,” outlining Ellen and Edith’s importance in Transcendentalism, literature, and nineteenth-century history through their words to one another, a glimpse into the storied lives of the women behind Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In honor of the book’s release, the Emerson House will be showcasing items from our Ellen and Edith collections later this month, some of which will be on display to the public for the first time. We invite you to come by for a visit.
