In this novel about Ralph Waldo Emerson's wife, Lidian, Amy Belding Brown examines the emotional landscape of love and marriage. Living in the shadow of one of the most famous men of her time, Lidian becomes deeply disappointed by marriage, but consigned to public silence by social conventions and concern for her children and her husband's reputation. Drawn to the erotic energy and intellect of close family friend Henry David Thoreau, she struggles to negotiate the confusing territory between love and friendship while maintaining her moral authority and inner strength. In the course of the book, she deals with overwhelming social demands, faces devastating personal loss, and discovers the deepest meaning of love. Lidian eventually discovers the truth of her own character and learns that even our faults can lead us to independence.
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The line between historical and fictional is murky in this nineteenth-century tale of love among the Transcendentalists. Lydia is a strong, independent woman in her thirties, sworn to remain single. Then she meets the brilliant Ralph Waldo Emerson and is swept off her feet by his promises of a new kind of egalitarian marriage. Once married though, Lydia discovers her husband's secret obsession with his dead wife. Lonely and disillusioned, Lydia falls in love with her husband's dashing young protege, the manly and odd Henry David Thoreau. As a romance novel, this is an excellent, engaging story. Readers will feel sympathy and affection for all of the characters. However, since this is a first-person narrative, the lack of a historical note explaining what in the novel is fact, what is conjecture, and what is fiction dulls the overall impression. Still, a good book-club or beach read, for it is a substantive page-turner. Marta Segal
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
"This is the book I longed to read. It is the story of Lidian, the fascinating woman who was loved insufficiently by Emerson and perhaps too much by Thoreau. Amy Belding Brown has brought her back to life in a novel that glitters with intelligence and authenticity." -Geraldine Brooks, author of Year of Wonders and March
"In this extraordinary book, Amy Belding Brown has brought the 19th century to life. We may think of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his family and friends as static daguerreotypes, but in this story they lightly spring off the page with all the inconvenient desires and ambitions that are the texture of our own lives. A soaring imaginative leap, this book combines detailed history with a page-turning illicit love story. It's a look at a rich moment in American History and a great read, a rare combination." -Susan Cheever, author of My Name is Bill and Note Found in a Bottle
"Brown's writing is graceful, at times giving Lidian a poetic voice….In an age when scholarly biographers meticulously document every detail in the actions and settings of their subjects, Brown has escaped to the freedom of fiction to suppose 'what might have been.'" -Christian Science Monitor
"Amy Belding Brown's novel is a beautiful work that renders effortlessly the sentiments and sensuousness of a woman who is, to use Ms. Brown's own terms, "at war with herself, a woman of opposites who yearns to reconcile her mental acuity with her emotional sensitivity." The spiritual, emotional and intellectual lives she is after illuminating for us are wonderfully ambitious, and it is quite refreshing to see that ambition backed up with a quality of writing that bears up to the weight of its subject matter."
-Bret Lott, author of the bestseller and Oprah-pick Jewel
"Mr. Emerson's Wife engages with intelligence and passion the mind of Lidian Emerson and what is found are the staggering daily compromises and frustrations of an intellectual 19th century woman. Bless all the conflicted freedoms she sought--and bless too Amy Belding Brown for delivering us a robust novel that situates itself with grace and struggle in feminine consciousness among the Concord men."
-Victoria Redel, author of Loverboy
"Where historians dare not go, Amy Belding Brown's imagination takes us in this fictional story of "Mr. Emerson's Wife" and she takes us in a vessel securely crafted from historical fact. She fills in the dark gaps of history with vivid imagination, and she does it without violating a single historical fact. Her powerful story telling allows us to see and understand a chapter in the making of America that all the biographies of Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller and the Alcotts can only hint at. I don't know who to celebrate more--the resurrection of Lidian Emerson or Amy Belding Brown's ascent to the first ranks of historical fiction."
-Wallace Kaufman, science writer and author of Coming Out of the Woods: The Solitary Life of a Maverick Naturalist
"Everyone who has ever entered into marriage with expectations that aren't met will be touched by this portrait of Lidian Jackson Emerson whose life was fixed on coupled stars: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Mrs. Emerson ultimately enters a terrain beyond duty and romance which is carved from years of hurt, loneliness, sterility of affection and the temptation to find love beyond the bounds of her promise. Finally understanding that "disillusion is the nature of marriage," she discovers the strength to live the life she was given rather than the life she once thought she must have."
-Phyllis Barber, author of How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir
"In this extraordinary book, Amy Belding Brown has brought the 19th century to life. We may think of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his family and friends as static daguerreotypes, but in this story they lightly spring off the page with all the inconvenient desires and ambitions that are the texture of our own lives. A soaring imaginative leap, this book combines detailed history with a page-turning illicit love story. It's a look at a rich moment in American History and a great read, a rare combination." -Susan Cheever, author of My Name is Bill and Note Found in a Bottle
"Brown's writing is graceful, at times giving Lidian a poetic voice….In an age when scholarly biographers meticulously document every detail in the actions and settings of their subjects, Brown has escaped to the freedom of fiction to suppose 'what might have been.'" -Christian Science Monitor
"Amy Belding Brown's novel is a beautiful work that renders effortlessly the sentiments and sensuousness of a woman who is, to use Ms. Brown's own terms, "at war with herself, a woman of opposites who yearns to reconcile her mental acuity with her emotional sensitivity." The spiritual, emotional and intellectual lives she is after illuminating for us are wonderfully ambitious, and it is quite refreshing to see that ambition backed up with a quality of writing that bears up to the weight of its subject matter."
-Bret Lott, author of the bestseller and Oprah-pick Jewel
"Mr. Emerson's Wife engages with intelligence and passion the mind of Lidian Emerson and what is found are the staggering daily compromises and frustrations of an intellectual 19th century woman. Bless all the conflicted freedoms she sought--and bless too Amy Belding Brown for delivering us a robust novel that situates itself with grace and struggle in feminine consciousness among the Concord men."
-Victoria Redel, author of Loverboy
"Where historians dare not go, Amy Belding Brown's imagination takes us in this fictional story of "Mr. Emerson's Wife" and she takes us in a vessel securely crafted from historical fact. She fills in the dark gaps of history with vivid imagination, and she does it without violating a single historical fact. Her powerful story telling allows us to see and understand a chapter in the making of America that all the biographies of Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller and the Alcotts can only hint at. I don't know who to celebrate more--the resurrection of Lidian Emerson or Amy Belding Brown's ascent to the first ranks of historical fiction."
-Wallace Kaufman, science writer and author of Coming Out of the Woods: The Solitary Life of a Maverick Naturalist
"Everyone who has ever entered into marriage with expectations that aren't met will be touched by this portrait of Lidian Jackson Emerson whose life was fixed on coupled stars: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Mrs. Emerson ultimately enters a terrain beyond duty and romance which is carved from years of hurt, loneliness, sterility of affection and the temptation to find love beyond the bounds of her promise. Finally understanding that "disillusion is the nature of marriage," she discovers the strength to live the life she was given rather than the life she once thought she must have."
-Phyllis Barber, author of How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating Transcendental Fiction,
By
This review is from: Mr. Emerson's Wife (Hardcover)
In the 1830s, Ralph Waldo Emerson was known throughout New England as a captivating lecturer and writer, as well as an eligible widower. Lydia Jackson heard him speak in her hometown of Plymouth, and she felt honored and almost unworthy when the great man afterward engaged her in personal conversation. Any number of women would gladly have exchanged places with her. But it was *she* whom Emerson sought out and *she* to whom he proposed marriage. (And *she* of whom he also demanded a name change and a move to Concord, but that's beside the point...)
Theirs was to be an intellectual match of equals and a real partnership, which was an unusual and ambitious undertaking for the time. But after the arrival of their first child, Waldo and Lidian fell into the traditional roles that marriages generally adhere to. For Lidian, the experience resulted in feelings of abandonment and unappreciation. She was often the last to know Waldo's travel plans for lecture tours. She became jealous of every female guest who spent time in parlor discussions with her husband -- with or without good reason -- especially Margaret Fuller. This was *not* the fulfilling life she had imagined. And so, wanting more, she turned to a close family friend for conversation, caring, and concern - Henry David Thoreau. History has shown that the two were friends. In this novel, they become a bit more intimate, with Lidian being the instigator. In the 21st century, we're not surprised by this kind of turn of events, for we read similar headlines about celebrity marriages and third-party affairs on the front covers of grocery store rags. Those of us who are Thoreau fans would like to think that he would have been above that kind of behavior. And Lidian too, for that matter. They were *Transcendentalists*, for heavens sakes! I was prepared to hate this book because I knew I disagreed with the Lidian-Henry relationship it describes. But I can't hate the book. It is a work of fiction, after all. I think it's otherwise a fair and valid portrayal of Lidian's life as Mr. Emerson's wife. Too frequently we hear about Ralph Waldo Emerson, and his second wife fades into the background, if she's mentioned at all. Reading this novel will provide a little more perspective into the daily life of the most influential man in 19th-century Concord. The moral of the story is: be careful what you wish for.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stunning historical fiction,
By
This review is from: Mr. Emerson's Wife (Hardcover)
I stayed up until almost 2:00 A.M. reading this book! What a gem! Beautifully written, exquisitely etched characters -- it's like being time-machined into an enchanting yesteryear and rubbing shoulders with the Emersons, Thoreaus and Alcotts!
Guess it would be classified as "historical fiction" but the book seems to effortlessly cross that thin, often shadowy dividing line between fiction and biography! What a perceptive and beautifully told account of Lidian (Lydia) Jackson Emerson -- a truly magnificent woman but one who, today, so few know. Obviously the author did meticulous research and it works --- step by step, Lidian is drawn out of the historical closet into the light. I was particularly struck by what Ms. Brown wrote in the "Author's Note" -- that the book "explores the 'cracks' in the historical record ... tells what 'might have been'....." She certainly succeeds -- the book is a real joy to read! And as an added bonus, glistens with thought-provoking, historical quotes. Read it -- you'll love it! It's definitely five star in my book!
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A novel which leads to further reading,
By
This review is from: Mr. Emerson's Wife (Hardcover)
During my reading of Mr. Emerson's Wife, I resolved to read more about the real lives of the characters involved:Lidian Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Historical fiction can sometimes be a little dry or heavy because it is stuffed too full of facts. Not the case here! I found Lidian Emerson to be a very sympathetic character. She marries a famous philosopher who promises her an equal and mutually respectful relationship, but especially after she becomes a mother, he turns his back on her and treats her like a servant. Lidian's relationship with Henry David Thoreau is what I am most curious about. The author stirs up a romance, a very believable romance, about which I very much enjoyed reading, but I'd like to know the facts. Probably she took some liberty, but such is the playground of fiction. I did not want this book to end, and have reserved some related reading for myself. An excellent first novel!
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