Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism: A Family History [Paperback]

Phyllis Cole (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 019515200X | ISBN-13: 978-0195152005 | Publication Date: March 14, 2002

Mary Moody Emerson has long been a New England legend, the "eccentric Calvinist aunt" of Ralph Waldo Emerson, wearing a death-shroud as her daily garment. This exciting new study, based on the first reading of all her known letters and diaries, reveals a complex human voice and powerful forerunner of American Transcendentalism. From the years of her famous nephew's infancy, in both private and published writings, she celebrated independence, solitude in nature, and inward communion with God.

Mary Moody Emerson inherited both resources and constraints from her family, a lineage of Massachusetts ministers who had earlier practiced spiritual awakening and political resistance against England. Cole discovers a previously unexamined Emerson tradition of fervent piety in the ancestors' own writing and Mary's preservation of their memory. She also examines the position of a woman in this patriarchal family. Barred from the pulpit and university by her sex, she also refused marriage to become a reader, writer, and religious seeker.

Cole's biography explores this reading and writing as both a woman's vocation and a gift to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Helping to raise her nephews after their father's death, Mary Moody Emerson urged Waldo the college student to seek solitude in nature and become a divine poet. Cole's pioneering study, tracing crucial lines of influence from Mary Emerson's heretofore unknown texts to her nephew's major works, establishes a fresh and vital source for a central American literary tradition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Cole's sophisticated scholarship culminates in an extraordinary landmark biography describing a remarkable woman in New England intellectual cultural history."--The Quest

"In this magisterial work of feminist archaeology, Phyllis Cole...recovers Mary's life in the contexts of late New England Calvinism, the Emerson family, women's opportunities in the early republic, and Mary's own crusty personality.... [Mary Moody Emerson] is fortunate indeed to have found in Phyllis Cole a thoughtful, erudite, and compassionate biographer.... The scholarly community is much in her debt for this splendid book, which illuminates Mary's life and much more."--Journal of English and Germanic Philology

"Cole's informed, carefully crafted writing makes for pleasurable reading. She does a service in telling the story of this important but obscure figure in American life and thought....Recommended for all academic collections."--Choice

"A multi- lensed and sourced, pulsing, living recreation of the Emerson family and its first genius, Mary Moody Emerson. More than an intertwined major contribution to literature, history, biography, and philosophy, this book is an original and first-time- ever detailing of how genius born into a female body in a certain time and place nevertheless transcends constriction through brilliant words, being, and action. Wondrous."--Tillie Olsen

"This is a grand, wide-ranging book about a great woman, Mary Moody Emerson, who was a founder of Transcendentalism, the earliest and best teacher of R.W. Emerson, and a spirited and original genius in her own right. Phyllis Cole's deeply researched book gives us both Mary Emerson's background and her life. This book adds a whole new context, a new methodology, and above all a wonderful new figure to American literature."--Robert D. Richardson, Jr. author of Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind and Emerson: The Mind on Fire

About the Author

Phyllis Cole is at Pennsylvania State University.

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (March 14, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 019515200X
• ISBN-13: 978-0195152005
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #302,961 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Taproot of Transcendentalism, September 6, 2004

By 

Jay Vogelsong (Philadelphia) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism: A Family History (Paperback)

If you were asked what historical New Englander loved solitude and independence, kept a life-long journal, combined interests in natural theology, idealist philosophy and romantic poetry, and influenced several of the most important thinkers of the 1800s, would you guess it was Ralph Waldo Emerson's aunt?

Author Phyllis Cole no doubt wrote this book primarily for other scholars. Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading it for several reasons. I love memoirs and biographies, and it is a detailed portrait of a remarkable and eccentric woman and of the difficult times she lived in. I have an interest in the evolution of ideas, and it describes how certain concepts were passed on and transformed through different lives and times. And I am fascinated by Transcendental philosophy, and here is the woman who, the author demonstrates, had such a profound influence on her nephew that Transcendentalism and all that came from it might not have existed in the same form without her.

Mary Moody Emerson was a woman who had to struggle against her times, which accounts for her later eccentricities. She lost her father early and grew up as almost a servant to her relatives, was never properly schooled but learned from the books she collected, avoided marriage and remained independent against the tide of her times, and sought self-expression through writing in her "Almanack," and through the influence she brought to bear on her friends and family. When Waldo and his brothers were still small children and their father, her brother, died, she stepped in to help raise the boys, and encouraged them all to be exceptional.

Always deeply religious, in her old age Mary looked forward to dying and took to wearing a white woolen shroud in anticipation. The author concludes, "Mary's famed death obsession was in fact a life obsession, a hunger for fulfillment perceived as impossible on earth." There is no surviving picture of Mary Moody Emerson, but this book is her remarkable portrait.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A 200-watt spirit in a 30-watt bulb!, November 30, 2009

By 

Bruce Proctor (West Bath, Maine) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism: A Family History (Hardcover)

Outrageously overlooked in the history of New England spirituality, Mary Moody Emerson (1774-1863), in this book, has at last been brought fully into public light.

To make sense of her contribution, much of the book catches the reader up with the early religious history of New England (I had little idea of the high-stakes tensions of the religious personalities in the New England Calvinist lines leading into the 19th Century!), and Mary's immediate milieu as a woman in that society. Her rigorous, forceful, idiosyncratic personality and guidance were a spiritual crucible for those around her, especially young men and women. Most notably, as far as history is concerned, with Ralph Waldo Emerson, a nephew. Waldo always regarded her as his seminal spritual mentor. She set the bar, and very high.

Scholarly, with a wealth of new material, this study offers the first full-length study of Mary Moody Emerson. Fascinating.

I knock one star off the five-star ranking because of the difficulty in reading. Part is the author's dense style, and part, perhaps, the very small type-face.