Bright Circle

In the last issue, I reviewed a new biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and this book is a complement in describing the lives, work and influence of five remarkable women in the age of transcendentalism: his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, his wife Lydia Jackson Emerson, then Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller. Mary was a formative influence on his upbringing, while the other women were his contemporaries. A group of young women came together at Elizabeth Peabody’s bookshop in Boston in 1839 to form a conversation society to answer the great questions of special importance to women: ‘What are we born to do? How shall we do it?’ This very well-written book redresses the balance away from an exclusive focus on Emerson and Thoreau.

Margaret Fuller is the author of a pioneering feminist book entitled Woman in the 19th Century. Avenues of development open to women were severely restricted, and this group sought to ‘move the mountains of custom and convention’ at a time when transcendentalism represented a new orientation towards the individual, asserting that God existed in each human being, who was therefore of infinite worth. The group believed that ideas could transform the world. As well as writing some of the earliest works of transcendentalism and editing its first magazine, they ‘contributed to a wide range of social causes that included the abolition of slavery, animal rights, and child education.’ (p. 7) In turn, they influenced the men in the circle – Lydia played an important role in persuading Emerson to become an activist for the abolition of slavery. The book makes the important point that the nation’s first philosophical and literary movement owed its existence as much to a group of women as to the better-known men. A brilliant and illuminating contribution.