Mary Moody Emerson among the Stars

Abstract Mary Moody Emerson (1774–1863), an omnivorous reader who recognized the importance of Romantic thought before almost anyone else in America, dreamed of becoming a writer. When that dream was dashed, she turned her attention to the education of her nephew, Ralph Waldo Emerson. She introduced him to Wordsworth and Coleridge, to German philosophy, and inculcated a love of nature in him. Just as important, she provided a model for him of the solitary, independent intellectual. So powerful was her example that Waldo mined her journals and letters, appropriating entire paragraphs into his sermons and, later, his essays. A remarkable thinker and writer in her own right, Mary Emerson’s ecstatic visions of nature and the divine, chronicled in the little-known spiritual journal she called her “Almanacks,” herald the arrival of a new movement soon to be known as transcendentalism.