55 of 58 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Detailed, deep, and well worth diving into, June 2, 2005
Not since 1950 and Louise Hall Tharp's book "The Peabody Sisters of Salem" has any author tackled the daunting task of writing a collective biography of these women. It's almost difficult to believe that Tharp and Marshall used some of the same personal letters as source material. For this new offering is the masterpiece, a Rolls Royce to Tharp's tricycle. No wonder it took decades to assemble and complete.
Though the sisters had three younger brothers, the accomplishments of the men pale in comparison with those of the women. Elizabeth (1804-1887) was a teacher, writer, publisher, and encouraging friend (and never more than that) to many of the Transcendentalists and their crew. Mary (1806-1887) was the beautiful one, another teacher, who set her sights early on snagging Horace Mann as a spouse (and eventually succeeded). Sophia (1809-1871) was the invalid artist who found her creative dream partner in husband Nathaniel Hawthorne. All were inspired by the example set by their mother, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1778-1853), whose liberal and feminist ideals are in retrospect more suggestive of the late 20th century, and not of her own time. The Peabodys were not among the financially elite Bay-Staters, but they seemed to have their fingers on the pulse of the commonwealth and on the trends of the country.
Framed at beginning and end by Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1842 wedding, this volume is one of the most detailed narrative chronicles of familial correspondence you're apt to read in your lifetime. It's never tedious, simply all-encompassing. The very words of the individuals themselves are so revealing, so personal. We can tap into their emotions of the moment: their joys, sorrows, angers, jealousies, misunderstandings, and hopes. After just a few chapters, the reader comes to KNOW these women and their fellow correspondents. The text is supplemented with b&w portraits of every major character in this real-life drama, giving us a chance to truly SEE them. Those were the days when people wrote and sent letters, then read the answers aloud to drawing-room audiences of friends and relatives. A different time indeed.
Though I and other reviewers elsewhere have given this book a high rating, it won't be for everyone. It's highly recommended for students (both casual and formal) of American history, American literature, and women's studies. Marshall's "The Peabody Sisters" is a wonderful dip into 19th-century life. It can be a culture shock to close the covers, blink your eyes, and return to the 21st century.
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26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A wonderful read of three amazing women. 4.5 stars, June 14, 2005
Oxen-like in size, this is a delight of a historical biography. The Peabody sisters are three extraordinary women well worth getting to know, which you will, intimately, in Megan Marshall's fantastic portrait of Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia.
Particularly with Elizabeth, the eldest and most influential, Murphy goes into such detail that it's as if the two were best friends. Innumerable letters and journal entries are quoted tirelessly (it inspires one to keep better record of one's own life), and you will be amazed at how thoughtful and brilliant Elizabeth was. The company she kept is a who's who of Boston's elite: tutored by Ralph Waldo Emerson, befriended by a famous Boston minister who used their discussions faithfully as the basis for his popular sermons, and personal friend of a Harvard University president who allowed her to peruse his bookshelf whenever she wanted--and all this before age twenty! Next is beautiful Mary, who learned early on to use her looks to her advantage, though unable to penetrate her older sister's shadow; and Sophia, the youngest, a notable artist who was crippled by headaches for much of her life, but was stronger than anyone gave her credit for. Mary eventually married Horace Mann, Sophia became Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Elizabeth never married, though it was she who befriended Mann and Hawthorne before either of her sisters knew the men. The book focuses mainly on the sisters' lives pre-marriages and their academic achievements and contributions to the Romantic Movement, not the family drama, though there is a decent enough helping of the latter that no one will feel cheated out of a good story.
Though not wealthy--often the Peabody family hovered near poverty, especially in early years--and denied college educations because of their sex (though that hardly seems to have handicapped them; each learned numerous languages, read with a vengeance, and developed learned opinions on virtually everything), the sisters transcended their social position and lack of formal education to became some of the most influential, powerful women of the time. It's too bad that they are not more well-known and celebrated than they are; only two books in recent literary history have been written about these great women, while biographies of Nathaniel Hawthorne, by comparison, are numerous. I must add that I had always thought of Hawthorne as a rather grim, foreboding man; through love letters to Sophia contained in "The Peabody Sisters," I now see him as a much more happy-go-lucky, humorous literary figure.
"The Peabody Sisters" is a book ten years in the making and is clearly a labor of love for the author. It is meticulously documented, even for a 450+-page biography (there are over 100 pages of notes that aren't required reading). Though I wouldn't call it a riveting read, the sisters' lives were fascinating and make for a very good book. Parts drag on--the first 80 pages were slow--but it is an inspiring read, one definitely worth your time.
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26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
a well-crafted personal, intellectual and social history, September 14, 2006
This review is from: The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (Paperback)
When you think of that somewhat hazy designation "The New England Transcendentalists," I'll bet the first legendary figure that automatically springs to mind is Ralph Waldo Emerson. It could just as easily be Thoreau, Hawthorne, Alcott, or another half dozen men of the time and place. Do the names Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody resonate with you, as well? They didn't for me until I read Megan Marshall's 2005 biography The Peabody Sisters. Marshall's narrative is the result of a monumental undertaking: spanning two decades and a continent, her tireless search for primary sources unearthed thousands of pages of journals and letters cached across the country in small-town libraries, universities, and private homes. She set out to read every word written by the sisters, and also studied the papers of their associates and pored over the many books the Peabodys say influenced them in their formative years. From this morass of material, Marshall marshaled (I couldn't resist) a group biography which not only discloses the early lives of the sisters in intimate detail, but paints a picture of the events, beliefs, prejudices, and social mores of that turbulent time in American history.
This is not the typical biography that follows its subjects to the grave. Marshall tells a coming-of-age story that ties the girls' spiritual struggles, attempts to define themselves, and strivings for self-development to those of the young nation. For the most part resisting the present-day temptation to posit all sorts of unconscious motivations, Marshall allows the sisters to speak directly for themselves. With a graceful economy of phrasing, she weaves together disparate threads from journal entries and correspondences to craft an intensely personal biography. This personal tone springs largely from the confessional quality of the diaries and letters.
Marshall opens and closes her story with the marriage of Sophia Peabody to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Although it was Elizabeth who initially attracted Hawthorne, he chose her sister as his bride. Interestingly, Elizabeth also attracted Horace Mann who chose, ultimately, to marry Elizabeth's other sister, Mary. Marrying Elizabeth was probably too big a risk: of the three Peabody sisters-- none of them intellectual slouches and none as conventionally ordinary as the typical New England woman-- Elizabeth was the most extraordinary. She was the most ambitious, socially and intellectually, and it is her narrative which is the more dramatic example of the frustrations of talented nineteenth-century women whose aspirations were bridled by social conventions. Moreover, it is Elizabeth's spiritual struggle which exemplifies the overarching crisis of the age: filling the emotional and cultural void left by the collapse of orthodox Christianity and this new generation's rejection of Calvinism.
When the Peabody sisters were growing up, optimism and expectation coincided with the youth of the nation, and the possibilities for the progress of humankind were in the air. Amidst boom and bust, cities rose, and for the first time in the new world young women lived independently, and backwoodsmen left the forest seeking the cultural commodities of the expanding towns. Transatlantic packets arriving in the ports discharged radical ideas with their passengers. In this atmosphere, the lives of the Peabody sisters were touched in some measure by the various great "isms" of their day: nationalism, liberalism, feminism, socialism, abolitionism, unitarianism, transcendentalism, and romanticism.
Yet, in the first decades of the nineteenth century in New England, the backcountry operated as if it were still a medieval theocracy. The seaboard, however, was more sophisticated, because of the constant influx of new immigration and foreign visitors, who brought with them the radical ideas of the Socinians, Swedenborg, and other circulating avant garde ideas. In lieu of fire and brimstone, the new intellectuals embraced a genteel Unitarianism. It was under this latter influence that Elizabeth and her sisters participated in the Great New England Schism and came to travel in Transcendentalist circles.
At different stages in her life, Elizabeth enjoyed a reciprocal connection with "representative men" such as William Ellery Channing, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Bronson Alcott, Horace Mann, Theodore Parker, Washington Allston, and- not to omit representative women- Margaret Fuller and Maria Sedgwick.
Channing, whose sermons galvanized the Unitarian movement, was Elizabeth's mentor and spiritual guide. He encouraged Elizabeth to broaden her studies and think seriously about theology, philosophy, and literature. It was through him that Elizabeth came to read the Romantic poets Coleridge and Wordsworth (with whom she developed a personal correspondence) and the philosopher Victor Cousin, whose presentation of the new German thought made Kant, Hegel, and Schelling accessible. Eventually Channing came to rely on Elizabeth's assistance in framing his weekly addresses for delivery and publication.
Elizabeth developed a close and constructive friendship with Emerson , as well. At first her tutor in Greek, Emerson took up Elizabeth's translation of Gerando's Self Education, which, together with his other works, was adapted by Emerson in composing the essays "Self-Reliance" and "Nature."
Beyond English poets and German idealists, the young Elizabeth and her sisters were especially affected by Germaine de Stael. Her explications of German philosophy fired the youthful Transcendentalists, but it was more her sexual exploits and renowned salon that captured the girls' imagination. Elizabeth would follow her example, albeit more sedately, by becoming a translator, writer and essayist, lecturer, bookseller, and by some accounts the first woman publisher in the new republic. From her press came the sermons of Channing, antislavery pamphlets, the first appearance of Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience," the Transcendentalist magazine The Dial, and several of Hawthorne's early works. Elizabeth's bookstore and circulating library became the hub of The Hub, the principal meeting place for Transcendentalists and social reformers.
Marshall is careful that all this intellectual history does not come at the expense of a good family drama: the pages are lively with tales of lost fortunes, unhinged spinsters, sexual predators, brutal medical treatments, hallucinations, barbaric fits of temper, opium abuse, suicide, pestilence, paralysis, covert rivalries, love affairs and betrayals.
Marshall wades waist high in ideological waters, honoring the Peabody sisters and their mother for unconventional views on marriage and a woman's independence, for their Herculean exertion at self-education and burning desire for creativity and action in a world disparaging of assertive women. At the outset, she quotes Emerson lauding the sequestered woman and means to elicit sympathy for Elizabeth upon her receiving scoldings from wealthy matrons and warnings from her beloved Channing for displays of her precociousness
In fact, all the men in this story come off badly. The Peabody men are ineffectual, Alcott fudges facts and mooches off people, Mann and Hawthorne, bombast to the contrary, toy with the affections of a woman they claim to respect, and even the saintly Channing and gentle Emerson, while loving, are nevertheless chauvinistic.
True, women, historically, have been held to a standard of modesty and selflessness and have enjoyed little autonomy or legal protection. Even so, Eliza Peabody, the girls' mother, still remembered a past in which the educated women of her affluent family exercised an authority arrogated by the well-to-do. She recalled her family's loss of enormous holdings in the Revolutionary period. By the time her girls came along, the family was fighting to subsist in freakish economic cycles marked by panics and depressions. Her daughters' best chances were a fortunate marriage or some means of independence. Eliza's own husband turned out to be a dismal provider, and the family's survival relied heavily on her education, begun in childhood among the vestiges of privilege. Everywhere in New England learning was synonymous with prestige, and it was fashionable to educate one's daughters, so Eliza ran a school.
Eliza's principle of "self-reliance" was born of an ugly necessity, more than from a theoretical embracing of The Rights of Woman. The gentlewomen of her kin had had more to lose than gain in seeking strict autonomy. Emerson's remarks echoed of a time in which privacy was a luxury reserved for a woman of means. For Eliza and her daughters, that world was gone.
Adumbrating Virginia Woolf's plaintive cry for A Room of Her Own, the Peabody sisters are representative of a class of women who, intelligent, genteel, expressive, and courageous, might still be as restricted today as they were then were it not for the efforts of their sisters in women's struggle for emancipation.
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