“I see my father – I forget him – my infancy, begun how grandly – how sunken now…Happy the man who finds an early bed of honor.” 

— Mary Moody Emerson

From Phyllis Cole’s book entitled
Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism

Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to her as Tnumarya, an anagram he created for his beloved aunt, Mary Moody Emerson. Many scholars believe her to be Emerson’s most seminal influencer. She was born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1774, the third daughter of Rev. William Emerson and Phebe Walker Bliss Emerson. They were the first family to inhabit what became known as The Old Manse.   

It was here on Rev. William Emerson’s land near The Old North Bridge, on the morning of April 19, 1775, that the American Revolution began in earnest. The now famous words, “…shot heard round the world,” were written by Mary’s favorite nephew, Ralph Waldo, in his poem, “Concord Hymn.” 

In September of 1824, the fifty-year-old Mary met General Lafayette during his Concord visit. She is known to have quipped that she, too, had been “in arms at the Concord fight.” She was referring to her mother’s arms as Phebe Emerson, then pregnant and holding eighteen-month-old Mary with three children at her feet, watched through an upper-story window of the manse as the battle for independence raged within sight of the Emerson family on that fateful day.   

Mary’s first loss occurred when her father, Rev. William Emerson, was called to join the Continental Army as chaplain at the request of Gen. George Washington. Shortly after arriving at Fort Ticonderoga in 1776, he took ill and died in Rutland, Vermont, while attempting to return to his family in Concord.  

Soon thereafter, two-year-old Mary was sent away by mother, Phebe, to live with family members. Loneliness, poverty, and hard labor were her constant companions as the young Mary learned her role as a domestic housekeeper and nursemaid. For Mary, it was a time of “slavery of poverty and ignorance and long orphanship.” It would take her nearly seventeen years to return to her beloved Concord. 

For her mother, Phebe, the decision to send her infant child away meant one less mouth to feed soon after becoming a widow. Also influencing Phebe’s decision was the dreaded prospect that all widowed mothers faced; what would become of their daughters who might not receive a marriage proposal? The family to whom Mary was sent would be expected to provide for her.  

Mary did, in fact, turn down at least two marriage proposals in her early adult life. Thinking herself unsuited for the role of wife, she believed that her God would never have created two genders where one was subservient to another. An expansive idea for a young woman born before the American Revolution.  

A colonial girl, Mary’s life was void of any formal education, but her brilliant mind and voracious appetite for learning never diminished throughout her nearly ninety years. Her journals, referred to as her “Almanacks,” are an impressive and expansive record of her reading, her thoughts, her spiritual life, and her self-gained knowledge.  

Although grounded in her Christian beliefs, she came to accept a wider, more liberal and expansive theocracy, including that of her Unitarian family members. Her love of nature and God’s divine purpose was influential and evident in her favorite nephew’s seminal work, Nature, written at The Old Manse in 1834.  

Much is known about the role Mary played in Waldo’s life due to their epistolary relationship. The decades of letters written between the two reveal not only a generational genius and unique, natural curiosity, but a genuine love and regard between the two.  

On the occasion of her memorial, a grieving Ralph Waldo reminded us that his Tnumarya “danced to the music of her own imagination.” She believed the trials of her life would be rewarded by a benevolent God in the next. She left no image of herself behind except the silhouette created in her youth. The work of this little-known, exceptional woman quietly remains in the lives of her extraordinary family, including the nephew who brought to a new country an American Transcendental movement.