Emerson’s Daughters: A Review and Special Event
Kate Culkin’s dual biography of the Emerson sisters was released in July of this year.
Ellen Tucker Emerson and Edith Emerson Forbes’ lives are often treated as a footnote to their famous father, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Kate Culkin’s recent dual biography, Emerson’s Daughters: Ellen Tucker Emerson, Edith Emerson Forbes, and Their Family Legacy (University of Massachusetts Press, 2025) brings these women’s stories to the fore, inviting interest in Ellen and Edith for their own sakes, as women leading both common and extraordinary lives.
While earlier works edited by Edith Gregg and Delores Bird Carpenter have highlighted Ellen’s letters [1] and writings about her mother [2], Edith has received less attention from scholars as an independent subject. Some works, such as Robert Habich’s Building Their Own Waldos (University of Iowa Press, 2011) and Barksdale Maynard’s Walden Pond: A History (Oxford University Press, 2004) touch on the Emersons’ children’s work on behalf of their father’s literary legacies. Culkin’s book is the first ever full biographical study devoted to either woman.
She richly details events in the sisters’ lives, with their correspondence with one another as a primary dialectical source. Two years apart in age, and with distinct personalities and disparate life choices, Ellen and Edith’s sister-bond was close. How each sister responded to shared experiences with their contrasting interests and values is often quite interesting and illuminating as to their personalities, life paths, and their mutual influence on their father’s legacy, sometimes in fascinatingly contradictory ways. Indeed, one could argue that the sisters’ relationship rather beautifully illustrates how growing up in a household infused with their parents’ self-reliant principles shaped each as distinct individuals within a shared kinship community. Instead, Culkin focuses on the sisters as a partnership.
This portrait of Edith (age 6) and Ellen (age 8) by Caroline Hildrith hangs in their parents’ bedroom at the Emerson House.
Ellen, her father’s secretary and the Emerson household manager, was integral to her father’s career as a celebrity author and lecturer. She offered hospitality to those who flocked to the Emersons’ home; organized, and later accompanied, her father for his trips and speaking engagements; and looked after his personal well-being. She was an anchor for the family in her sturdy dependability, and a leader in her local faith community. Edith, interested in social causes and literature, worked tirelessly editing anthologies, such as Parnassus (1874), in her father’s name. When she married and began her own family, she changed the family dynamics, but not their closeness. Sociable and well-connected, Edith had a broadening influence on the family’s sphere.
Culkin’s biography opens the door to getting to know both Ellen and Edith more intimately.
Through October, Emerson’s Daughters: An Ellen & Edith Exhibition is on display at the Ralph Waldo Emerson House in Concord, MA. Featuring never-before-displayed artifacts and clothing belonging to Ellen Tucker Emerson and Edith Emerson Forbes, the exhibit seeks to bring Culkin’s biography tangibly to life. As a special, one-day-only, event, Culkin will lead two guided tours of the Emerson House exhibition on Sunday, September 28, 2025 to offer further insights into the sisters’ lives (1 p.m. and 3 p.m.; advanced reservations recommended. For details and tickets, please click here.)
— K.L. Martin, PhD, Emerson House guide and historical interpreter
WORKS CITED:
Ellen Tucker Emerson, The Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson, in 2 volumes, ed. Edith E. W. Gregg (Kent State University Press, 1982).
Ellen Tucker Emerson, The Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson., ed. Delores Bird Carpenter (Michigan State University Press, 1992).
