The Peabody Sisters: Three Women who Ignited American Romanticism

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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005 - 602 pages
PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST: "A stunning work of biography" about three little-known New England women who made intellectual history (New York Times). This book is highly recommended for students and reading groups interested in American history, American literature, and women's studies.

Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody were in many ways our American Brontës. The story of these remarkable sisters--and their central role in shaping the thinking of their day--has never before been fully told. Twenty years in the making, Megan Marshall's monumental biograpy brings the era of creative ferment known as American Romanticism to new life.

Elizabeth, the oldest sister, was a mind-on-fire thinker. A powerful influence on the great writers of the era--Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau among them--she also published some of their earliest works. It was Elizabeth who prodded these newly minted Transcendentalists away from Emerson's individualism and toward a greater connection to others. Mary was a determined and passionate reformer who finally found her soul mate in the great educator Horace Mann. The frail Sophia was a painter who won the admiration of the preeminent society artists of the day. She married Nathaniel Hawthorne--but not before Hawthorne threw the delicate dynamics among the sisters into disarray.

Marshall focuses on the moment when the Peabody sisters made their indelible mark on history. Her unprecedented research into these lives uncovered thousands of letters never read before as well as other previously unmined original sources. The Peabody Sisters casts new light on a legendary American era.
 

Selected pages

Contents

Luly 91842
1
ORIGINS 17461803
13
2 Legacies
17
3 Seductions
28
4 Belinda
39
5 Flight into Union
48
THE FAMILY SCHOOL 18041820
59
7 Salem Girlhoods
64
SOPHIA 18291832
189
19 My Soul Steps Forth upon the Paper
201
2O First Retreat into Solitude
213
21 Scatteration
224
SOMERSET COURT AND LA RECOMPENSA 18331835
237
23 Blind Fair
257
24 Cuba Journals
271
BEFORE THE AGE IN SALEM 18361839
307

8 The Doctor and His Wife
82
9 Heretical Tendencies
88
IO Beginning to Live
94
ELIZABETH 18211824
103
12 Boston
118
13 Maine
133
MARY AND ELIZABETH 18251828
147
15 There Is No Scandal in Brookline
153
16 Life Is Too Interesting to Me Now
171
17 An Interior Revolution
179
26 Little Waldo Jones Very and the Divinity School Address
327
27 The Sister Years
349
13 WEST STREET BOSTON 18401842
379
29 Mr Ripleys Utopia
399
30 Two Funerals and a Wedding
422
MAY I 1843
441
Acknowledgments
455
Notes
459
Index
581
Copyright

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About the author (2005)

Megan Marshall is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, and Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, her work has been awarded the Francis Parkman Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, and the BIO Award, the highest honor given by the Biographers International Organization to a writer who has advanced the art and craft of biography. Marshall is Charles Wesley Emerson Professor of writing, literature, and publishing at Emerson College.

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