On a rainy morning in early May, in the small back parlor of 13 West Street, Boston, a wedding was about to take place. It would be the second wedding for the Peabody family in less than a year, and while 38-year-old Elizabeth could certainly claim an intimate relationship with each of the handsome grooms, she would be bride to neither. 

Five weeks before, in March of 1843, tall, silver-haired Horace Mann had proposed to Elizabeth’s younger sister Mary, who immediately accepted. She had, after all, been patiently awaiting Horace for ten years - since the day they met. Upon seeing his smile for the very first time in 1832, Mary wrote that she was “riveted” by Mann and, “I felt the glow permeate every fibre & vein. I knew nothing more till I was seated by the window in my own apartment…. Here was life and something to do…. to make that smile perpetual.” 

At the same time, Mary correctly sensed that she should probably keep these rather astonishing feelings to herself at the moment, for Horace was in absolutely no state to return Mary’s instant ardor. He had only recently lost his young wife, Charlotte, who had died of consumption less than two years into the marriage (and was likely pregnant with their first child). She was nursed by her tender husband right up to the end. The loss staggered and broke Mann so completely that friends describe watching his dark hair turn completely white in a matter of weeks. 

Horace Mann, 1849, six years after he and Mary were married on West Street. 

| US Library of Congress

While both sisters were inexorably drawn to the intense sadness that was Horace Mann, Elizabeth, perhaps, had more in common with him, and Mary was nervously aware of this. The elder sister’s fiery intellect and ability to converse endlessly on nearly any subject meant she often commanded Mann’s full attention, even in larger social settings with other women present. 

Mary worried to herself at having to watch the two “hold metaphysical arguments long enough to exhaust all common minds” and at their “talk, talk, talk, ad infinitum”. Nor would it have soothed Mary’s nerves while she was unavoidably far away in Cuba, to receive a letter from Elizabeth in which she describes a private visit from Horace and how he “took both my hands—and drew me for one moment absolutely in his arms.” 

Two years later it was still unclear to everyone involved if Horace Mann’s heart would ever mend, or whether it would ultimately lean towards Mary or Elizabeth. But in less than three years this particular sibling love triangle would be surpassed by a second, much messier one involving the youngest Peabody sister, Sophia. 

Plagued by debilitating headaches, mysterious pains, and general frailty her entire life, Sophia spent a great deal of time in her room alone, painting when she was well enough. Simple things, such as the clatter of knives and forks would become “excruciating torture”, and she forbid her own father from rocking in his chair when she was in the room due to the extreme dizziness it caused her. 

Sophia existed firmly within this puzzling miasma of symptoms that both exasperated and greatly concerned her family. So in the late fall of 1837, when Elizabeth triumphantly succeeded in gaining a visit from an unknown author she had been pursuing, she couldn’t wait to tell Sophia, and perhaps bring a little cheer into her day. 

Momentarily leaving her hard-won guest, Elizabeth flew up the stairs to Sophia’s sick room and exclaimed, “Mr. Hawthorne and his sisters have come, and you never saw anything so splendid—he is handsomer than Lord Byron!” She urged her younger sister to dress and come meet the writer, but Sophia replied that she thought it “rather ridiculous to get up…. if he has come once, he will come again.” 

Sophia’s prediction was correct. During the long winter months of 1838, the shy, remarkably good-looking Nathaniel Hawthorne would visit the Peabody household frequently. Many dozens of letters would be exchanged until the very nature of his relationship with Elizabeth progressed into new levels of intimacy.

“I will come for you whenever you say I may, and wait on you at home”, Hawthorne wrote to Elizabeth, and then quite boldly added, “I wish you would come for my sake.” The attachment grew stronger on both sides until an understanding of sorts would be reached; he and Elizabeth were to marry. 

It wasn’t until spring that the delicate Sophia finally felt strong enough to venture forth and meet her sister’s love interest, Nathaniel. 

On the day of Sophia’s first appearance, she was dressed in a “simple white wrapper” and managed to stand long enough to glide down to the parlor where she immediately occupied the whole of a couch reserved there for her use. Elizabeth later recalled how Hawthorne, stopping mid-conversation “rose and looked at her—he did not realize how intently.” 

Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1841, one year before he and Sophia Peabody were married on West Street. 

| Portrait by Charles Osgood, Peabody Essex Museum

Later, after the first wedding on West Street, and the newly minted Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne had moved to the Old Manse in Concord, Elizabeth would vehemently deny her relationship to Nathaniel was anything but professional interest. She claims to have written to him immediately, reframing their understanding as a “mistake on both our parts to regard it other than mere friendship…. I bade him farewell and then I went away.” 

She took a softer view of her previous relationship with Mann during he and Mary’s ceremony the following spring, delighting in the newly “illuminated countenance of Mr. Mann, so full of joy & tenderness” which was once, “so heartrending to see.” 

While it can’t be said that the Peabody sisters all lived happily ever after, they did live fully within the lives each had chosen. Elizabeth, unlimited and unfettered by any one relationship, continued to engage with fascinating and intellectual people over her long, productive life.

If you’d like to learn more about Sophia, Mary, and Elizabeth Peabody, Megan Marshall’s The Peabody Sisters is a magnificent biography that reads like a novel, and is the perfect place to start. Other sources for this article include Philip McFarland’s Hawthorne in Concord, and Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England.