Mary Moody Emerson: The Godmother of Transcendentalism

BY VICTOR CURRAN

The Marquis de Lafayette visited Portland, Maine during a grand tour of the United States in 1825. When Mary Moody Emerson—fifty years old at the time— was introduced to the aging hero of the American Revolution, she told him she was “‘in arms’ at the Concord Fight.”1

It was a joke, but as always, her wit had an edge of truth. She was indeed present for the “shot heard ’round the world,” but the “arms” she was in were her those of her mother, clutching eight-month-old Mary as the battle raged 150 yards from her window at the Old Manse.

That battle set both America and Mary Emerson on steep paths to independence. The next year, Mary’s father, Rev. William Emerson, died while serving as an Army chaplain and her mother, Phebe Bliss Emerson, suddenly found herself a widow with five children. Overwhelmed, she sent two-year-old Mary to live with relatives in Malden, Massachusetts, a time the little girl would recall as her “infant exile” and “invariably gloomy.”2 The family lived in the shadow of poverty, and Mary was put to work as what historian Robert Gross calls a “domestic drudge.”3 One of her chores “was to watch for the approach of the deputy-sheriff, who might come to confiscate the spoons or arrest the uncle for debt.”4

This hard-luck childhood formed her self-reliant character. Her nephew Ralph Waldo Emerson would later write, “Destitution is the muse of her genius,”5 but she learned to read, and in books she escaped to a world of inspiration and imagination.

As a teenager, Mary was called back to Concord, but her mother—now remarried and raising a new family—set Mary to work at what she called “duties which tried me.” She found respite in Concord’s new Charitable Library, co-founded by her stepfather, Reverend Ezra Ripley. There she began to discover “a religion of rational proof and . . . understanding the physical universe as a revelation of God.” She believed God was both “good and knowable.”6 A decade before her nephew Ralph Waldo Emerson was born, she was envisioning transcendentalism.

Mary wrote down her thoughts, at first in a journal she called her Almanack, and later in a literary magazine, the Monthly Anthology, that her brother William published while he served as minister of Boston’s First Parish. Inspired by books like Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women and Germaine de Staël’s The Influence of Literature on Society, she stressed the importance of nature and imagination in ways that anticipated both transcendentalism and Romantic literature.

In the religious debates of the early 1800s, Mary allied herself with neither side. She blended the intuitive, enthusiastic religious experience of her Calvinist ancestors with the benevolent, forgiving God and appeal to reason of the cool-headed Unitarians. In her own words, “I danced to the music of my own imajanation.”7

When her brother William died in 1811, Mary stepped in to help care for his children, including seven-year-old Ralph Waldo. Over the years that followed, “Emerson derived much of his character from his aunt,”8 according to Elizabeth Peabody (who also helped guide Waldo on the road to transcendentalism).

N.C. Wyeth painting of Mary sitting with an admiring young Henry Thoreau. Created to illustrate the book Men of Concord, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1936.

Courtesy Concord Free Public Library

Her next protégé was Sarah Alden Bradford, who would later marry Mary’s half-brother Samuel Ripley and become a respected scholar herself. Sarah recalled that Mary “sought me out . . . [and] enchained me entirely in her magic circle.”9

In the 1820s, as Waldo Emerson was studying at Harvard for the ministry that he would later abandon, Mary offered him a vision of faith with no church at all: “In entire solitude, minds . . . find in the uniform and constant miracle of nature, revelation, altar, and priest.” Those at odds with the church, she said, could “desert openly and form a novel religion.”10 After his ordination, Waldo continued his correspondence with Mary, often weaving her ideas into his sermons.

1846 daguerreotype of Ralph Waldo Emerson by Alfred Sands Southworth

Courtesy Concord Free Public Library

After he left the ministry, Waldo settled in Concord and wrote Nature, the essay that would launch his literary career and inspire the Transcendentalist movement. Mary’s biographer Phyllis Cole writes that “Waldo incorporated more of what he had learned from Mary in Nature than in any other single published work of his career.”11

In 1830s Concord, Mary’s religious fervor found an earthly mission in the campaign to abolish slavery. Mary was as eager to end slavery as her father had been to defeat the tyranny of King George.

Wax bas-relief of Rev. William Emerson, the father of Mary Moody Emerson

Courtesy Concord Free Public Library

She attended speeches by leading abolitionists and formed alliances with others including Mary Merrick Brooks, a founder of the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society. Mary Emerson and Mary Brooks conspired with Emerson’s wife Lidian to enlist her charismatic husband in support of the cause. It took them seven years to convince him that his faith in the essential goodness of humanity compelled him to action for social justice. At last, in 1844, he spoke out at the Concord courthouse on the tenth anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies.

As if lighting the fires of transcendentalism and anti-slavery in Emerson weren’t enough, Mary nurtured Thoreau’s free spirit and search for meaning in nature. Thoreau biographer Laura Dassow Walls shares Henry’s impression of Mary: “‘The wittiest and most vivacious woman that I know’ Thoreau wrote . . . the ‘least frivolous’ and the surest to provoke you to ‘good conversation’ . . . Mary enjoyed his company and Henry admired her genius . . . He preferred the company of women who took on leadership roles, like his own mother and sister—all bold, smart, well read, and outspoken.”12

Ever fearless, Mary seemed to taunt death. As Waldo Emerson remembered, “she had her bed made in the form of a coffin” and had a dress made in the style of a burial shroud. She “wore it as a nightgown, or a day-gown [and even] went out to ride in it, on horseback.”13

Photo of Mary Moody Emerson taken shortly after her death

MS Am 2982 (84) Houghton Library, Harvard University

She was ready for death long before it came. She died 1863, at the age of 88. Having witnessed the start of the war for American freedom in 1775, she lived to see the Emancipation Proclamation.

Mary Moody Emerson lived in a society that denied women a public platform, but by imparting her wisdom to her nephew and his associates, she passed her vision on to generations of readers.

Victor Curran writes and leads tours of historic Concord and is an interpreter at the Concord Museum. He teaches courses and writes articles about the men and women who made Concord the home of American independence and imagination.

1Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Amita,” lecture for the Boston Women’s Club, 1869; 2Phyllis Cole. Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism. Oxford University Press, 1998; 3Robert Gross. The Transcendentalists and Their World. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, (In press, scheduled publication November 2021); 4Emerson, op. cit.; 5Ibid; 6Cole, op. cit.; 7 Ibid; 8Elizabeth Peabody, March 9, 1869, quoted by Harriet Hanson Robinson in Papers of Harriet Hanson Robinson and Jane Harrison Robinson, Schleisinger; 9 Joan Goodwin. The Remarkable Mrs. Ripley: The Life of Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley. Northeastern University Press, 1998; 10 Nancy Craig Simmons, ed., Selected Letters of Mary Moody Emerson, Univ. of Georgia Press, 1993; 11 Cole, op. cit. 12Laura Walls. Henry David Thoreau: A Life. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2017; 13 Emerson, op. cit.