Bright Circle

Abstract In November 1839, a group of young women in Boston formed a conversation society “to answer the great questions” of special importance to women: “What are we born to do? How shall we do it?” Five of these women are at the center of Bright Circle, a group biography of remarkable thinkers and artists who played path-breaking roles in the transcendentalist movement. Transcendentalism remains the most important literary and philosophical movement to have originated in the United States. Only recently have scholars come to realize that it could not have been possible without a network of fiercely intelligent women who made substantial contributions to the new movement even as they found themselves silenced by their culturally assigned roles as women. Bright Circle reorients our understanding of transcendentalism and helps us to see the movement as far more collaborative than is commonly understood. In so doing, it recounts the lives of Mary Moody Emerson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Lydia Jackson Emerson, and Margaret Fuller as they pushed their male counterparts to consider the rights of enslaved people of color and women and argued that social justice was not separable from philosophy or aesthetics. In examining these women, we learn that many ideas considered original to Emerson and Thoreau were first articulated by those who had little opportunity of publicly expressing them.