The Peabody Sisters
Although Elizabeth, Mary and Sophie Peabody never became too famous in history books, they were well-known around Salem and Boston in the first half of the 1800s. All three were close friends with Emerson, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May who wrote Little Women) and William Ellery Channing, a liberal Unitarian minister. Mary, the middle sister, finally married Horace Mann, a member of the Massachusetts Senate, and Sophia, after 4 years of engagement, married the budding author, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Elizabeth, the older sister, became too interested in teaching, writing, and transcendentalism to have time for marriage. However, she briefly competed with her sisters for the attention of both Horace Mann and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Freelance writing, women’s discussion groups, and later her own book store in Boston became her main interests in life.
Through their mother’s training, all three Peabody girls became teachers and developed their own schools. But the youngest sister, Sophia, was more interested in her drawings, paintings and sculpture work, when she was free from her migraine headaches. Some of her drawings were used in her husband’s first book, Twice-told Tales.
Transcendentalism became the main interest for many liberal-minded Bostonians at that time and especially for Elizabeth. Besides having weekly meetings of the transcendentalist club at her bookstore, Elizabeth also published their journal, The Dial, while Ralph Waldo Emerson edited it. Brooks Farm finally became the club’s utopian settlement, but Nathaniel Hawthorne, before his marriage to Sophia, was the only close friend who lived there for any length of time.
Megan Marshall’s biography of the Peabody sisters was based mainly on their letters to each other. Although their "lives spanned most of the nineteenth century," Marshall, perhaps to fulfill her subtitle, "Three Women who Ignited American Romanticism" abruptly ends her story in the 1840s, after Sophia and Mary are married. She failed to mention Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic and best-known novel, The Scarlet Letter, which he finished in 1850.
The Peabody Sisters was published in 2005 and contains many illustrations of people and places that became celebrated in New England during the Nineteenth Century.