Emersons Daughters: Ellen Tucker Emerson, Edith Emerson Forbes, and Their Famil [Paperback]

Longlisted for the 2026 Plutarch Award

Ellen Tucker Emerson and Edith Emerson Forbes, the daughters of Lidian Jackson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, grew up in the heart of Concord, Massachusettss famed literary community. In a culture that celebrated self-reliance, Ellen and Edith formed a partnership that only strengthened as their paths diverged, with Ellen remaining in the family home and Edith marrying William Forbes, moving to Milton, Massachusetts, and having eight children. The partnership allowed them to tend to the demands and opportunities created by their fathers career, including serving as his secretaries and editors, and helped them shape his posthumous image. It also enabled them to adapt to historical developments stretching from the Civil War to American imperialism as well as personal ones, including Ediths growing family and travel and study abroad, and inevitable ones brought on by the aging processes of their parents and themselves.

Emersons Daughtersis a biography of a sisterhood, the first full-length study of Ellens and Ediths lives. Building on archival research into the extensive correspondence between the sisters, it adds to the growing body of work on womens contribution to Transcendentalism while opening a window onto the rich, and understudied, family life of the Sage of Concord. 

KATE CULKINis professor of history at Bronx Community College and teaches research methods in biography and memoir in the biography and memoir masters program at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is author of Harriet Hosmer: A Cultural Biography.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Preface
Abbreviations

1. Our Beautiful Poem Edith, and Our Excellent Prose Ellen (18391851)
2. We Each Have Something Good and Both Want All (18521860)
3. I was Never So Carried Away by Anything Before (18611865)
4. I Wrote for Myself as Well as for You (18651872)
5. What a læ