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WRITING THE LIFE OF A LIFE WRITER: FAMILY BIOGRAPHY AND
ELLEN TUCKER EMERSON
Kate CULKIN *
My first biography was about a woman who led a dramatic life. Harriet Hosmer (1830‐1908) was
an internationally celebrated sculptor, who moved to Italy from Watertown, Massachusetts, in 1852,
at the age of 22. There were challenges in telling her life story, but finding a dramatic narrative was
not one of them. 1 This was also true in my job as an editor of the Harriet Jacobs Family Papers;
Jacobs, born into slavery in North Carolina, escaped and hid in an attic for seven years, then wrote
about her life in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861. 2
I am now involved in a different sort of project, which requires me to find a strategy to tell of a
much quieter life. Ellen Tucker Emerson (1839‐1909) was the daughter of Lidian Jackson and Ralph
Waldo Emerson, the Transcendentalist author. Ellen, who never married, lived with her parents until
their deaths, serving as secretary and editor for her father and nurse and housekeeper for her
mother, who was often ill. At a very young age, she was making it clear that this was her path, but
with little explanation. Ellen wrote long, detailed letters, especially to her sister, filling them with
information about running the house and news from people in Concord. But rarely does she reflect
on her inner life or explain the choices she made. This reticence has at times frustrated me as a
biographer, making it difficult to find a compelling narrative on which to focus.
I have begun to find my way into her story through looking at her own work as a biographer. She
wrote a long biography of her mother, “The Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson,” and a shorter work on
her father, “What I Remember About Father.” These works, not published during her lifetime, were
part of a larger project of Emerson and her sister Edith and brother Edward trying to shape the legacy
of their famous father. They also were attempts by a woman who had lived in the shadow of her
family to assert her own intellect and her vision of what was important in her family and in the world.
As I have proceeded to work on this project, I have had to weigh her words with other evidence to
develop a picture of her life, often finding discrepancies.
While it was her father who was famous to the outside world, it was her mother whom Ellen
memorialized first and more seriously. Lidian Jackson Emerson died on November 13, 1892, a
decade after her husband. She was an intelligent woman who often found her lot as the wife of a
famous man challenging and frustrating. Born in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1802, she did not
marry until she was 33. She was her husband’s second wife; the first, also named Ellen Tucker
Emerson, had died of tuberculosis. There was an intellectual spark between Waldo and Lidian, but
the mundane details of family life weighed on her, as did serving as hostess to the endless line of
visitors Waldo’s fame attracted. As Ellen explained, “For a great many years she only had Father’s
company whom she had got in the habit of regarding from the housekeeper point of view, as people
from whom everything must be done beautifully, and much trouble taken, so that her work must be
set aside, but who would probably not regard her as anything but a housekeeper.” 3 The death of her
first child, also named Waldo, of scarlet fever in 1842 compounded her tendency towards
depression. In 1854, when she was only 15, Ellen took over the running of the family house, Bush,
while her mother often took to her bed.
Ellen began working on the memoir of her mother in 1895, three years after Lidian died. In
February, Ellen wrote to her sister that she and her houseguests were going to read the large
collection of Lidian’s old letters. 4 Then in April, at a dinner party, she was reminded of a comment
*
Department of History, Colston 301, 2155 University Avenue, Bronx, NY 10453 Bronx
Community College, CUNY.