Lydia Jackson Emerson

Abstract Lidian Jackson Emerson (1802–1892) has been almost entirely overshadowed by her famous husband, but she was viewed differently by her contemporaries. Elizabeth Peabody said of her, “We had a beautiful talk about a variety of most intellectual and spiritual things—And I should think she had a rare characteristic of genius—inexhaustible originality.” One of the first to perceive Transcendentalism’s limitations, she reasoned that if the self was of preeminent importance, then people could find no meaning in anything greater than themselves. Lidian convinced her husband to redirect his rarefied philosophy toward the plight of enslaved African Americans. And her “Transcendental Bible”—a satirical rewriting of the gospel from the perspective of the reformers who visited her house—remains unparalleled in its portrait of Transcendentalism’s smug self-satisfaction and its imagining of a road not taken by the movement headquartered in her house.