The Peabody Sisters
Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Pulitzer Prize Finalist: “A stunning work of biography” about three little-known New England women who made intellectual history (The New York Times).
Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody were in many ways the 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 biography brings the era of creative ferment known as American Romanticism to new life.
Elizabeth Peabody, the oldest sister, was a mind-on-fire influence on the great writers of the era—Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau among them—who also published some of their earliest works; it was she who prodded these newly minted Transcendentalists away from Emerson’s individualism and toward a greater connection to others. Middle sister Mary Peabody was a passionate reformer who finally found her soul mate in the great educator Horace Mann. And the frail Sophia, an admired painter among the preeminent society artists of the day, married Nathaniel Hawthorne—but not before Hawthorne threw the delicate dynamics among the sisters into disarray.
Casting new light on a legendary American era, and on three sisters who made an indelible mark on history, Marshall’s unprecedented research uncovers thousands of never-before-seen letters as well as other previously unmined original sources. “A massive enterprise,” The Peabody Sisters is an event in American biography (The New York Times Book Review).
“Marshall’s book is a grand story . . . where male and female minds and sensibilities were in free, fruitful communion, even if men could exploit this cultural richness far more easily than women.” —The Washington Post
“Marshall has greatly increased our understanding of these women and their times in one of the best literary biographies to come along in years.” —New England Quarterly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Marshall's outstanding debut is a triple biography making clear that Margaret Fuller wasn't the only woman of substance in Transcendentalist circles in 19th-century Massachusetts. The Peabody sisters were bright, gifted, independent and influential; they knew a host of notables, from Abigail Adams to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Oldest sister Elizabeth, who according to Marshall helped start the Transcendentalist movement, ran a school with Bronson Alcott, who named his third daughter in her honor. Mary made a name for herself first as a teacher and writer, and as the wife of educational reformer Horace Mann, who founded Antioch College. Youngest sister Sophia was an artist whose work included illustrations for her husband, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Only Elizabeth, by all accounts the most intellectual of the sisters, never married, though she was in love with both Hawthorne and Mann before either man fell for her sisters the bonds among the three survived, but they were, in Marshall's words, "prone to covert rivalries and shifting alliances." Marshall has distilled 20 years of research into a book that brings the sisters to life, along with their extended family and friends, and the time in which they matured: a time, Marshall notes, that allowed women to be on a more equal footing than they would enjoy later in the century. The only problem is that her book ends far too soon, covering barely the first half of the sisters' lives, the half the author finds more creative and illuminating. 57 b&w illus.
