Mary Moody Emerson

Mary Moody Emerson (August 23, 1774 - May 1, 1863) was known not only as her nephew Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “earliest and best teacher,” but also as a “spirited and original genius in her own right” (Richardson on back cover of Origins). Ralph Waldo Emerson considered her presence in his life a “blessing which nothing else in education could supply” (Emerson Lectures 432); and her vast body of writing—her thousands of letters and journal entries spanning more than fifty years—“became one of Emerson’s most important books” (Richardson 25). Her surviving documents reveal the voice of a “woman who […] had something to say to her contemporaries and who can continue to speak to ours” about “the great truths that were the object of her life’s pilgrimage” (Cole Origins xl, xxvii).

Born in Concord in 1774, Mary Moody Emerson was the fourth child of Phebe Bliss and the Reverend William Emerson. Both the Emerson and the Bliss family forebears came to Massachusetts with the first generation of Puritan settlers in the 1630s, and both families’ histories deeply involved religious ministry. Ever since Mary’s great-great grandfather Joseph Emerson settled in Concord, at least one son in each succeeding generation was ordained a minister of the church. Included in this “ministerial dynasty” was Mary’s great uncle Joseph Moody, who appeared before his congregation with a handkerchief covering his face—the inspiration for the protagonist in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “The Minister’s Black Veil” (Cole Origins 18, 22). Many of the Emerson men attended Harvard, and the family was generally respected and genteel though not wealthy, integrally involved in the New England Calvinist milieu (Cole Origins chpt 1).

In 1776, after suffering the loss of her father to “army-fever,” two-year-old Mary was sent out of Concord to live in Malden, Massachusetts with her grandmother, who was in poor health, and her aunt Ruth, who suffered from insanity (Emerson Lectures 400). This marked the beginning of what Mary Emerson later called a time of “chaos and deprivation” (Cole Origins 56). Separated from her mother and siblings, reared with little social interaction and meager formal education, she wrote that her life in Malden was a “slavery of poverty & ignorance & long orphanship […and] lonesome solitude” (Cole “Advantage” 7). The family was so impoverished that they very often subsisted on a “bread-and-water diet” and would send the young Mary to keep watch for the debt-collecting sheriff (Emerson Lectures 419, 400). Mary’s journal entries suggest that living in “calamitous poverty” and isolation as a youth profoundly affected her entire life (Richardson 24). She wrote many years later, “Oh I could give facts of the long drawn years of imprisoned minds & hearts w’h uneducated orphans endure[d]” (Letters xxxix).

...
Wikipedia