Mary Moody Emerson
This month we begin a series profiling some of the strong women who were very much a part of Emerson’s life, starting in his childhood. We start with his Aunt Mary Moody, who was instrumental in shaping Emerson’s ideas, writing and actions, starting after his father died when Emerson was just eight years old.
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Aunt Mary Moody Emerson delivered “the most important part of Emerson’s education,” ultimately influencing his views, reading habits, and his writing. [1] Waldo [2] wrote “A good aunt is more to the young poet than a patron.”[3]
Mary’s involvement in Waldo’s life commenced after the death of his father, William Emerson, in 1811, when she stepped in to help his mother Ruth raise her five sons. While Mary changed her living situation frequently, her influence was extended through thousands of letters and copies of her journal, Almanack, started when she was 20 years old. Waldo began his own journal, The Wide World, when he was 17 years old and a student at Harvard. Aunt Mary counseled all the Emerson boys to do what they were afraid to do.
Mary’s Almanacks and letters became a rich source of material for Waldo in his own writing: his poems, essays, and lectures. He kept four MME workbooks and often pleaded with Mary to send him sections of her Almanack, which he routinely copied and referred to as his career progressed from minister to author and speaker. After rereading Mary’s letters in 1841, he wrote, “Aunt Mary…is a genius always new, subtle, frolicsome, judicial, unpredictable.” [4]
Mary Moody Emerson was born in 1774 to William and Phebe Bliss Emerson; she was one of five children, another of which was Waldo’s father, William. Shortly after, the American Revolution commenced beside the family home—Concord’s Old Manse—and with her father going to war as a military chaplain, two-year old Mary was sent to live with her grandmother in Malden, Massachusetts. At that time it was not an uncommon practice to share responsibility for children among family members.
Mary’s father William died in 1776, and even after her mother, Phebe, remarried, Mary was not called back home. She often referred to this period as her “infant exile.” [5] After her grandmother died, when Mary was four years old, she was adopted by her Aunt Ruth Emerson. Mary’s childhood was characterized by drudgery and a lack of money and food.
Mary’s Elm Vale Farm bordered Bear Pond in Waterford, Maine.
Mary Moody Emerson is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in the Emerson family plot. The inscription on her headstone was written by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Photo by B. Ewen.
Silhouette of Mary Moody Emerson, courtesy of Concord Free Public Library.
Despite humble beginnings and very little access to formal education, Mary became a prolific—but largely unpublished—writer, and a voracious reader of works by such authors as Milton, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Plato, and Boston minister William Ellery Channing. She directed her nephew Waldo to read and appreciate these writers.
Mary decided at an early age not to marry, although she was asked. Fiercely independent, by the 1830s Mary championed the causes of those oppressed, including antislavery movements and women’s rights to better education. She supported her nephew Charles as he gave an antislavery address in Concord in 1835, and attended several abolitionist gatherings. She counted intellectual and free-thinking women as her friends and confidantes, including educator Elizabeth Peabody, scholar Elizabeth Hoar, abolitionist Mary Merrick Brooks, scientist and educator Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, and Waldo’s wife Lidian Emerson. Mary introduced Lidian to Mary Merrick Brooks, prompting Lidian to join Concord’s Female Antislavery Society.
Mary’s appreciation for nature and its impact on thought occurred much earlier than the mid-nineteenth century reflections that permeated essays, books, and talks written by Waldo, Thoreau and others. In the early 1800s, in the words of her biographer, “she lived and wrote a celebration of the solitary imagination and of nature as analogous to God, valuing both explicitly as a woman’s resources.” [6] In 1831, Mary purchased a farm in Waterford, Maine, which she named Elm Vale. She often wrote to her nephews to share her appreciation for the landscape surrounding Elm Vale, including the mountains, the trees, and Bear Pond. Waldo, Ruth (Waldo’s mother), Charles and Lidian Emerson, Elizabeth Hoar, Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, and Elizabeth Peabody, all visited Mary at Elm Vale. Mary sold Elm Vale in 1851, which was necessary but also very difficult for her. Before she left she wrote in her Almanack, “What a bird dancing on that graceful limb. Had I but his iron pen how could I give praise for every bird & tree w’h have met my responding senses in this tranquil and beautiful vale.” [7]
Energetic and very outspoken, Mary was often considered difficult and challenging. But those challenges were more than compensated for by her commitment to and support of the contemporaries and young people she valued. After meeting with Mary when she was 77 years old, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “it is perhaps her greatest praise and peculiarity that she, more surely than any other woman, gives her companion occasion to utter his best thought. In spite of her own biases, she can entertain a large thought with hospitality…In short, she is a genius…” [8]
Robert Richardson, Jr., author of the Emerson biography The Mind on Fire, wrote in praise of Phyllis Cole’s Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism, “Mary Moody Emerson was a founder of Transcendentalism, the earliest and best teacher of R. W. Emerson and a spirited and original genius in her own right.” [9]
Mary Moody Emerson died on May 1, 1863, at the age of 88. Six years later, on March 1, 1869 Waldo delivered an address entitled Amita—Latin for “aunt”— to the New England Women’s Club in Boston. More than 100 people attended—including Lidian and Ellen Emerson, Elizabeth Peabody, Julia Ward Howe and Louisa May Alcott. In his talk he said that Mary “gave high counsels. It was the privilege of certain boys to have this immeasurably high standard to their childhood; a blessing which nothing else in education could supply.” The minutes recorded from the event pointed out that the presentation enabled attendees to consider “a New England woman of rare gifts and originality of character.” [10]
— B. Ewen, Emerson House guide
WORKS CITED:
Robert D. Richardson Jr., The Mind on Fire. (Berkley, California: University of California Press, 1995). 23.
While at Harvard, Emerson decided that he wanted to be addressed as “Waldo” not “Ralph.”
Qtd in Evelyn Barish, Emerson. The Roots of Prophecy. )Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989). 53.
Qtd in Richardson, 25.
Qtd in Phyllis Cole, Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 71.
Qtd in Cole, 8
Qtd in Cole, 279.
Qtd in Cole, 283.
Robert D. Richardson Jr., Book jacket blurb, back cover of Phyllis Cole’s Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism. Paperback and hardcover editions.
