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Sedgwick School. Waldo’s letters, however, present a family in crisis as Lidian struggles with physical
illness and depression. He wrote to one friend, “if Ellen were not coming home in October, with
ambition to keep house for us, I should be seriously tempted to sell mine, so feeble is Lidian & such is
the trial of bad domestics.” 20 When Waldo’s friend Caroline Tappan criticized him for cutting short his
daughter’s education, he complained, “where is my house to be in the meantime.” 21
After reading her father’s letters, I have begun to get a sense of the pressure, implicit and explicit,
that Ellen must have felt to be the savior of her mother and her father, even though it not spelled out
in the family documents. Her feelings were likely compounded by her place in the family; she was the
elder daughter and the child who survived, after her brother’s tragic death. In her biography of her
mother, Ellen does address her mother’s depression. She notes Lidian’s “sad thoughts” and states
that that “her sorrow seemed irredeemable, her lot hopeless” despite being “actually blest with
everything the human creature could desire.” 22 Ellen does not connect her mother’s depression
directly to her own self‐sacrifice, but she notes the dark moods began to lessen as the Emerson
children grew older and were available “not only as readers but as assistants and companions.” 23
Perhaps just as significantly, Ellen ties Lidian’s depression to her tendency to think deeply about
issues, especially the issue of forgiveness and truth. She describes at length the mental rabbit hole
her mother would go down, desiring to forgive, but also not thinking it right to forgive those who
were false or who she thought were in the wrong. Reading all of this material together makes it
easier for me to understand the choice of a young girl to insist she take on the role of caregiver, that
she never marry, and then, despite what is clearly a keen intelligence, that she willfully not reflect on
those choices, at least not for years to come.
As I have worked, I have asked myself, “Is Ellen’s vision wishful thinking?” Did Emerson present a
vastly different face to his family than he did to the world, even close friends like Margaret Fuller? In
struggling with answering these questions, I have, at least in part, reframed them. At least for now,
my emphasis is on why Ellen wanted to depict her father this way in her writing, rather than
answering whether her vision is some objective “truth” about the kind of father and husband he was.
I believe one reason Ellen wanted this emphasis is that, in a somewhat convoluted way, it allowed
her to stress the importance of family to her father’s success. As I mentioned earlier, this emphasis
was a project taken on by all of the Emerson children after their father’s death. Her sister and
brother wrote memoirs of him as well, and they all worked with his biographer, James Elliot Cabot, to
stress the importance of his domestic life to his success. Ellen played a particularly critical role in her
father’s career, especially in his later life as his memory failed. She travelled with him to lectures,
sewing his pages together so he wouldn’t lose his place and prompting him when he forgot a word.
Ellen also collaborated with her father and Cabot as an editor of Letters and Social Aims (1875),
insisting her work not be publically acknowledged. Her deeply ingrained sense of self‐sacrifice made
it difficult for her to claim the credit she was due, but she could insist on the centrality more
generally of her family to her father’s work.
In conclusion, I want to add a few thoughts on writing the biography of a woman who led a quiet
life. As I said at the beginning, this project has been a change of pace for me. Much of this paper has
been about developing an understanding of elements of Ellen’s life that seemed incomprehensible to
me. But another question I have wrestled with is why is this project significant? Is it just because of
the light it throws on her father’s life? That did not seem satisfying to me. I have been more and
more interested in the way Ellen’s life, while acknowledging it was one of privilege, allows us to see
about how a woman navigated the 19 th century and what the silences in a life story can reveal.
In recent months, I have come to see that a critical part of how Ellen navigated her life was her
relationship with her sister, Edith Emerson Forbes. While Ellen stayed home and cared for her
parents, Edith married the wealthy William Forbes in 1865 and moved to Milton, Massachusetts. She
had eight children and a happy, chaotic home. Despite their differences, the sisters’ lives were