Mary Moody Emerson, aunt of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was born in Concord, Massachusetts, the fourth of the five children of the Rev. William and Phebe (Bliss) Emerson. Her father’s death in 1776 and her mother’s marriage in 1780 to the Rev. Ezra Ripley left her to be reared by an aunt and uncle on a lonely farm in Malden.
The old couple were desperately poor, and Mary, with a legacy of ten dollars a year for clothes and charity, grew up in poverty and solitude, nourishing her intellect on the Bible, odd volumes of sermons, and a battered Paradise Lost, minus covers and title-page, which she conned for years without discovering its author’s name.
Ultimately she inherited the Malden farm, and the proceeds from its sale enabled her to live in penurious independence. For years she made her home with her sister’s family at “Elm Vale” in South Waterford, Maine, where the beauties of the countryside were to her a source of continuous delight. She ministered to her relatives in sickness, bereavement, and other distress; declined, probably for religious reasons, an offer of marriage from a man whom she esteemed; met many of the notables of the day; migrated from town to town in search of cheap boarding places; became learned in the poets, the theologians, and the philosophers, reading with sharply critical eyes and an inerrant taste for superior writing; kept a voluminous journal; and supervised with inexorable zeal the education and intellectual growth of her nephews, the sons of her deceased brother William. Over Ralph Waldo in particular she exercised an influence that dominated much of his early work and that remained strong until the end. To a great extent he formed his style on hers, copying her unpredictable metaphors, her flinty native words, her soaring eloquence. Her intimate knowledge of family history made her the living bond between him and his ancestors. He begged her to bequeath him her journals; he read and reread her papers as late as 1870; in fitting together his essays he borrowed from her as freely as from Plutarch and Montaigne. His love and veneration for her is recorded in his journals and was never stronger than when she broke with him over his theological radicalism and refused to live in the same town with him. Reconciliation did come eventually, for in secret she was proud of him and his fame. With Henry David Thoreau, who also appreciated her, she enjoyed a notable friendship. Emerson and Thoreau saw that she was a religious genius and reverenced her accordingly. Ordinary folk, however, were appalled by her eccentricities, macabre humors, and brutal, sardonic candor. The last four years of her long life were spent in the home of her niece, Hannah Upham Haskins (Mrs. Augustus Parsons), in Williamsburgh, Brooklyn, N. Y. , where she died. She was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord.
From childhood she was imbued with the bleak grandeurs of High Calvinism, beside which the Unitarianism, Transcendentalism, and humanitarianism that she encountered in later years seemed stunted and unimaginative.
His love and veneration for her is recorded in his journals and was never stronger than when she broke with him over his theological radicalism and refused to live in the same town with him.
Holding that “they were born to be educated, ” she saw to it that in spite of every obstacle they were educated.
Ordinary folk, however, were appalled by her eccentricities, macabre humors, and brutal, sardonic candor.
One of them may speak for all: “She was bookish, rather strong-minded, not nice in her habits; would do for these days better than in the time when women were retired and modest in manners, and had great reverence for the stronger sex” (Mrs. A. E. Porter, apud B. K. Emerson, post, pp. 173-74).
