Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.