The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism - Softcover

Marshall, Megan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0618711694 ISBN 13: 9780618711697

Publisher: Mariner Books, 2006

Synopsis

Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody were in many ways our American Brontes. 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 biograpy brings the era of creative ferment known as American Romanticism to new life. Elizabeth, the oldest sister, was a mind-on-fire thinker. A powerful influence on the great writers of the era — Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau among them — she also published some of their earliest works. It was Elizabeth who prodded these newly minted Transcendentalists away from Emerson's individualism and toward a greater connection to others. Mary was a determined and passionate reformer who finally found her soul mate in the great educator Horace Mann. The frail Sophia was a painter who won the admiration of the preeminent society artists of the day. She married Nathaniel Hawthorne — but not before Hawthorne threw the delicate dynamics among the sisters into disarray. Marshall focuses on the moment when the Peabody sisters made their indelible mark on history. Her unprecedented research into these lives uncovered thousands of letters never read before as well as other previously unmined original sources. The Peabody Sisters casts new light on a legendary American era. Its publication is destined to become an event in American biography.

This book is highly recommended for students and reading groups interested in American history, American literature, and women's studies. It is a wonderful look into 19th-century life.

About this title

About the Author

MEGAN MARSHALL is the winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Biography for Margaret Fuller, and the author of The Peabody Sisters, which won the Francis Parkman Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2006. She is the Charles Wesley Emerson College Professor and teaches narrative nonfiction and the art of archival research in the MFA program at Emerson College. For more, visit www.meganmarshallauthor.com.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. 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. Agent, Katinka Matson.(Apr. 13)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0618711694
• ISBN 13: 9780618711697
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 624