Mary Moody Emerson

Mary Moody Emerson (August 23, 1774May 1, 1863) was an American letter writer and diarist. She was known not only as her nephew Ralph Waldo Emerson's "earliest and best teacher", but also as a "spirited and original genius in her own right". Ralph Waldo Emerson considered her presence in his life a “blessing which nothing else in education could supply”; and her vast body of writing—her thousands of letters and journal entries spanning more than fifty years—"became one of Emerson's most important books". Her surviving documents reveal the voice of a "woman who […] had something to say to her contemporaries and who can continue to speak to ours" about "the great truths that were the object of her life's pilgrimage". Biography Early life Born in Concord in 1774, Mary Moody Emerson was the fourth child of Phebe Bliss and the Reverend William Emerson. Both the Emerson and the Bliss family forebears came to Massachusetts with the first generation of Puritan settlers in the 1630s, and both families' histories deeply involved religious ministry. Ever since Mary's great-great grandfather Joseph Emerson settled in Concord, at least one son in each succeeding generation was ordained a minister of the church. Included in this “ministerial dynasty” was Mary's great uncle Joseph Moody, who appeared before his congregation with a handkerchief covering his face—the inspiration for the protagonist in Nathaniel Hawthorne's story "The Minister's Black Veil". Many of the Emerson men attended Harvard, and the family was generally respected and genteel though not wealthy, integrally involved in the New England Calvinist milieu.