writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

closely intertwined. Ellen regularly decamped to Milton to help with her nieces and nephews; Edith
intervened when she felt the strain of caring for their parents became too much for Ellen. Their
extensive correspondence details their daily lives, their evolving relationship, and their experiences
as the daughters of their famous father. While their father’s fame did make their lives unusual, their
correspondence also opens a door on how women leaned on their relationships with their sisters as
the moved through the rapidly changing world of the 19 th century.
Keywords: Family, Memoir, Parents, Letters, Daughters
Kate CULKIN
Associate Professor
Department of History, Colston 301, 2155 University Avenue, Bronx, NY 10453
Bronx Community College, CUNY
kculkin@gmail.com
Notes
1
Kate Culkin, Harriet Hosmer: A Cultural Biography (Amherst: Massachusetts University Press,
2010).
2
Jean Fagan‐Yellin, Joseph M. Thomas, Kate Culkin and Scott Korb, eds, Harriet Jacobs Family
Papers (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
3
Ellen Tucker Emerson, The Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson, ed. Delores Bird Carpenter (East
Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1992), 130.
4
Ellen Tucker Emerson to Edith Emerson Forbes, Feb. 1895. Ellen Tucker Emerson
Correspondence, ca. 1835—1909, *2003M‐13. Houghton Library (Box 3), Harvard University,
Cambridge, MA.
5
Emerson, The Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson, 155.
6
Ellen Tucker Emerson to Edith Emerson Forbes, Aug. 30, 1895. Ellen Tucker Emerson
Correspondence, ca. 1835—1909, *2003M‐13. Houghton Library (Box 3), Harvard University,
Cambridge, MA.
7
Emerson, The Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson, 182.
8
Emerson, The Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson, 84.
9
Emerson, The Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson, 167‐68
10
Emerson, The Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson, 155.
11
Ellen Tucker Emerson to Mrs. Grimm, March 2, 1868, in The Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson, ed.
Edith E.W. Gregg (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1982), 1: 462.
12
Ellen Tucker Emerson to Mrs. Grimm, March 2, 1868, in The Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson, ed.
Edith E.W. Gregg (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1982), 1: 462.
13
Ellen Tucker Emerson to Edith Emerson Forbes, Feb. 3, 1873, in The Letters of Ellen Tucker
Emerson, ed. Edith E.W. Gregg (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1982), 2: 55.
14
For a discussion of “The Transcendentalist Bible” see: Delores Bird Carpenter, “Lidian Emerson’s
‘The Transcendentalist Bible,’” Studies in the American Renaissance, 7 (1980): 91‐95.
15
Emerson, The Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson, 81.
16
Quoted in Joel Myerson, ed., “Margaret Fuller’s 1842 Journal: At Concord with the Emerson’s,”
Harvard Library Bulletin 21 (July 1973), 331.
17
Edith Tucker Emerson, “What I Remember about Father,” quoted in Edith Emerson Webster
Gregg, “Emerson and His Children: Their Childhood Memories,” Harvard Library Bulletin 28
(1980): 408.
18
Emerson, “What I Remember about Father,” 412.
19
Ellen Tucker Emerson to Lidian Jackson Emerson, Aug. 6, 1854, in The Letters of Ellen Tucker
Emerson, ed. Edith E.W. Gregg (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1982), 1: 70.
20
Ralph Waldo Emerson to Abel Adams, Aug. 7, 1854, in The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed.
403