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Bright Circle: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism
A group biography of five women who played path-breaking roles in the transcendentalist movement
In November 1839, a group of young women in Boston formed a conversation society “to answer the great questions” of special importance to women: "What are we born to do? How shall we do it?" The lives and works of the five women who discussed these questions are at the center of Bright Circle, a group biography of remarkable thinkers and artists who played pathbreaking roles in the transcendentalist movement.
Transcendentalism remains the most important literary and philosophical movement to have originated in the United States. Most accounts of it, however, trace its emergence to a group of young intellectuals (primarily Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau) dissatisfied with their religious, literary, and social culture. Yet there is a forgotten history of transcendentalism--a submerged counternarrative--that features a network of fiercely intelligent women who were central to the development of the movement even as they found themselves silenced by their culturally-assigned roles as women.
Bright Circle is intended to reorient our understanding of transcendentalism: to help us see the movement as a far more collaborative and interactive project between women and men than is commonly understood. It recounts the lives of Mary Moody Emerson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Lydia Jackson Emerson, and Margaret Fuller as they developed crucial ideas about the self, nature, and feeling even as they pushed their male counterparts to consider the rights of enslaved people of color and women.
Many ideas once considered original to Emerson and Thoreau are shown to have originated with women who had little opportunity of publicly expressing them. Together, the five women of Bright Circle helped form the foundations of American feminism.
In November 1839, a group of young women in Boston formed a conversation society “to answer the great questions” of special importance to women: "What are we born to do? How shall we do it?" The lives and works of the five women who discussed these questions are at the center of Bright Circle, a group biography of remarkable thinkers and artists who played pathbreaking roles in the transcendentalist movement.
Transcendentalism remains the most important literary and philosophical movement to have originated in the United States. Most accounts of it, however, trace its emergence to a group of young intellectuals (primarily Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau) dissatisfied with their religious, literary, and social culture. Yet there is a forgotten history of transcendentalism--a submerged counternarrative--that features a network of fiercely intelligent women who were central to the development of the movement even as they found themselves silenced by their culturally-assigned roles as women.
Bright Circle is intended to reorient our understanding of transcendentalism: to help us see the movement as a far more collaborative and interactive project between women and men than is commonly understood. It recounts the lives of Mary Moody Emerson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Lydia Jackson Emerson, and Margaret Fuller as they developed crucial ideas about the self, nature, and feeling even as they pushed their male counterparts to consider the rights of enslaved people of color and women.
Many ideas once considered original to Emerson and Thoreau are shown to have originated with women who had little opportunity of publicly expressing them. Together, the five women of Bright Circle helped form the foundations of American feminism.
416 pages, Hardcover
Published January 23, 2025
48 people are currently reading
2830 people want to read
About the author
Randall Fuller
8 books18 followersRandall Fuller is the author of From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature, which won the Phi Beta Kappa’s Christian Gauss Award for best literary criticism, and Emerson’s Ghosts: Literature, Politics, and the Making of Americanists. He has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is the Chapman Professor of English at the University of Tulsa.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
June 21, 2025
I don't usually write a long reviews but, for me, this book was special. I even bought it. Many would not be as interested, but I studied the Transcendentalist and the people in the book were familiar to me.
Bright Circle brings to life again the lives of five BRILLIANT women living mostly in the first half (plus) of the 1800’s. Their fathers and mothers were more likely Calvinists or Puritans and they all valued and sought as much education as was available to them. The lived in Concord Mass, Maine, and Boston and together were formable voices for the rights of women, though I don’t believe they knew it at the time. They also were the core of the Transcendental movement, an offshoot of the Romantics. In the afterward of the book the author, Randall Fuller, makes the case their essays, sermons, conversations, and books were important literary contributions that became overshadowed by the more famous Ralph Waldo Emmerson and Henry David Thoreau.
Mary Moody Emerson was the Ralph Waldo’s aunt and without her sermons and journaling, we wouldn’t have the writing of Emmerson as they are. She did not see eye to eye with the religious leaders ( and her nephew) of the day, but she was confident, courageous and independent. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody was an educator and a pioneer of the kindergarten. Sophia Peabody Hawthorne married Nathaniel, and was also a very very talented artist who butted up against the belief that only men could be great painters. At first she did not want to marry at all as the life of a wife was dreary, but she and Nathaniel had a good marriage and she entertained many of the visitors who came to see him. Lydia Jackson Emmerson married the famous Ralph Waldo Emmerson and was a friend Henery David Thoreau. She was in favor of the abolitionists, the native Americans, and other social issues of her time.
The most famous of the five in Margaret Fuller, surely a genius who educated herself in languages, philosophy, religion, and mythology . She wrote articles for and edited The Dial, the Transcendental magazine. Women would pay and travel a great distance to join her conversations where she educated the intelligent women who came. Her most famous book was Women in the Nineteenth Century. This section was fascinating .
Overall, I was deeply impressed by their ability to flaunt the expectations for women and make a meaningful life and a contribution to society. We women owe them a debt.
Bright Circle brings to life again the lives of five BRILLIANT women living mostly in the first half (plus) of the 1800’s. Their fathers and mothers were more likely Calvinists or Puritans and they all valued and sought as much education as was available to them. The lived in Concord Mass, Maine, and Boston and together were formable voices for the rights of women, though I don’t believe they knew it at the time. They also were the core of the Transcendental movement, an offshoot of the Romantics. In the afterward of the book the author, Randall Fuller, makes the case their essays, sermons, conversations, and books were important literary contributions that became overshadowed by the more famous Ralph Waldo Emmerson and Henry David Thoreau.
Mary Moody Emerson was the Ralph Waldo’s aunt and without her sermons and journaling, we wouldn’t have the writing of Emmerson as they are. She did not see eye to eye with the religious leaders ( and her nephew) of the day, but she was confident, courageous and independent. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody was an educator and a pioneer of the kindergarten. Sophia Peabody Hawthorne married Nathaniel, and was also a very very talented artist who butted up against the belief that only men could be great painters. At first she did not want to marry at all as the life of a wife was dreary, but she and Nathaniel had a good marriage and she entertained many of the visitors who came to see him. Lydia Jackson Emmerson married the famous Ralph Waldo Emmerson and was a friend Henery David Thoreau. She was in favor of the abolitionists, the native Americans, and other social issues of her time.
The most famous of the five in Margaret Fuller, surely a genius who educated herself in languages, philosophy, religion, and mythology . She wrote articles for and edited The Dial, the Transcendental magazine. Women would pay and travel a great distance to join her conversations where she educated the intelligent women who came. Her most famous book was Women in the Nineteenth Century. This section was fascinating .
Overall, I was deeply impressed by their ability to flaunt the expectations for women and make a meaningful life and a contribution to society. We women owe them a debt.
February 4, 2025
The most fascinating feminist history book I have ever read. I am truly grateful to have come across it. The author profiles several remarkable women of the nineteenth century whose ideas and lives laid the groundwork for what many of us take for granted today. I found his writing tender and moving, which made me care for them and keep turning the pages.
June 20, 2025
The women who are the subject of this book are fascinating and vibrant and emotionally interesting. Unfortunately the style of writing of this book is none of those things. I can’t help but think the subjects of this book would have been bored reading it.
March 19, 2025
Abandoned. So repetitive I got bored.
May 10, 2025
Taking its title from Margaret Fuller's description of the women who participated in her conversational series, Bright Circle centers the transcendentalist movement around female figures - namely, Ralph Waldo Emerson's aunt Mary Moody Emerson; teacher, bookseller. and publisher Elizabeth Peabody; Peabody's artist sister Sophia Peabody Hawthorne; Emerson's second wife and reformer Lydia "Lidian" Jackson Emerson; and editor and journalist Margaret Fuller.
Touching on the interconnections between these five subjects, but not an examination of the relationships shared between the women as an intellectual circle, Randall Fuller rather presents a series of long, largely synthetic, biographical essays that taper off roughly when the next is going to pick up. As such, this is a good choice for readers looking to be introduced to these remarkable women's lives without doing a deep dive into the substantial biographies on each individual.
The book goes over much of the already existing biographical and literary scholarship on these individuals and female transcendentalism. The most original chapter is that on Lydia Jackson Emerson, who has not received much scholarly attention beyond Delores Bird Carpenter's collection of her selected letters and edited <> The Life of Lidain Emerson written by Emerson's daughter. The over-all style is somewhat meandering in its organization, and by the end of the book, the author's reiteration of events and reoccurring descriptions becomes repetitive, making me wonder how this book could have been written more chronologically as a collective study rather than as individual subjects.
Continually focusing on the relationships these women had with Ralph Waldo Emerson made the author's intention to reorient the center of the Transcendentalism Movement as collaborative (which it was) and Boston rather than Concord-centeric—a contention that has already been made in scholarship on female Transcendentalists—less successful, because we continually keep coming back to the Emerson House in Concord, and the inadvertent affect seems to be that Emerson is the movement's central figure (man or woman). Instead the book seemed to be about women who influenced Emerson.
Lastly, even the best scholars make unfortunate mistakes (myself very much included), and there are a plethora of small factual errors throughout, beginning with the misleading implication on page one that Peabody's teaching career ended after the Temple School scandal early in her career; something which is disproven by later chapters. Other small errors will only bother readers with deep knowledge of Concord, Massachusetts' history, such as: there was no apple orchard at the Old Manse in 1775; Mary's mother was not Phebe Walker Bliss (that was her grandmother); Emerson's first wife didn't have a brother didn’t have a brother (I don't think); Sleepy Hollow in Concord was not yet a cemetery in the 1830s or 1840s; and George Ripley was in fact not Ralph Waldo Emerson’s cousin (but a second cousin to Emerson’s step grandfather Ezra Ripley).
Despite these criticisms, Fuller gets the broad strokes right and his writing is eminently readable, sometimes slipping into creative nonfiction. While I would have appreciated a different approach, which would have offered a greater opportunity to further enrich this material with a more original lens by looking at the circle of women in a more cohesive and collective manner, this is, nonetheless, a wonderful book for anyone wanting to learn about (or revisit) these fascinating women's lives in one volume.
Updated to add: The hardcover edition has glossy pages and plentiful full color illustrations. The font is quite small.
Touching on the interconnections between these five subjects, but not an examination of the relationships shared between the women as an intellectual circle, Randall Fuller rather presents a series of long, largely synthetic, biographical essays that taper off roughly when the next is going to pick up. As such, this is a good choice for readers looking to be introduced to these remarkable women's lives without doing a deep dive into the substantial biographies on each individual.
The book goes over much of the already existing biographical and literary scholarship on these individuals and female transcendentalism. The most original chapter is that on Lydia Jackson Emerson, who has not received much scholarly attention beyond Delores Bird Carpenter's collection of her selected letters and edited <> The Life of Lidain Emerson written by Emerson's daughter. The over-all style is somewhat meandering in its organization, and by the end of the book, the author's reiteration of events and reoccurring descriptions becomes repetitive, making me wonder how this book could have been written more chronologically as a collective study rather than as individual subjects.
Continually focusing on the relationships these women had with Ralph Waldo Emerson made the author's intention to reorient the center of the Transcendentalism Movement as collaborative (which it was) and Boston rather than Concord-centeric—a contention that has already been made in scholarship on female Transcendentalists—less successful, because we continually keep coming back to the Emerson House in Concord, and the inadvertent affect seems to be that Emerson is the movement's central figure (man or woman). Instead the book seemed to be about women who influenced Emerson.
Lastly, even the best scholars make unfortunate mistakes (myself very much included), and there are a plethora of small factual errors throughout, beginning with the misleading implication on page one that Peabody's teaching career ended after the Temple School scandal early in her career; something which is disproven by later chapters. Other small errors will only bother readers with deep knowledge of Concord, Massachusetts' history, such as: there was no apple orchard at the Old Manse in 1775; Mary's mother was not Phebe Walker Bliss (that was her grandmother); Emerson's first wife didn't have a brother didn’t have a brother (I don't think); Sleepy Hollow in Concord was not yet a cemetery in the 1830s or 1840s; and George Ripley was in fact not Ralph Waldo Emerson’s cousin (but a second cousin to Emerson’s step grandfather Ezra Ripley).
Despite these criticisms, Fuller gets the broad strokes right and his writing is eminently readable, sometimes slipping into creative nonfiction. While I would have appreciated a different approach, which would have offered a greater opportunity to further enrich this material with a more original lens by looking at the circle of women in a more cohesive and collective manner, this is, nonetheless, a wonderful book for anyone wanting to learn about (or revisit) these fascinating women's lives in one volume.
Updated to add: The hardcover edition has glossy pages and plentiful full color illustrations. The font is quite small.
July 1, 2025
This well-written and carefully researched book brings forth the lost stories of five women in the l830s who may have laid the groundwork for the transcendentalist movement. Although Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are often credited with this cultural movement, the women behind them may have actually been responsible when they began to ask questions about "What are we born to do?" and "How shall we do it?"As mothers and wives as well as women who elected not to marry, many felt stymied intellectually. The lives of five women are brought forward in this book--Mary Moody Emerson, aunt of Ralph Waldo; Peabody sisters Elizabeth Palmer (who remained single) and Sophia who married Nathaniel Hawthorne; Lydia Jackson Emerson, second wife of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Margaret Fuller, a great intellectual and ardent seeker of knowledge. Education for women at this time was sparse but these women persisted and sought out knowledge. They were highly read and often sp0ke and read several languages. Transcendentalism was a literary and philosophical movement born in the U.S., greatly accelerated when Elizabeth Peabody's bookstore in Boston became the meeting place for discussions, often led by Margaret Fuller. More surprising is how many of the people who have come through time as literary greats were part of this movement. A number of them , including Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa May Alcott, lived in Concord, Mass. This movement also influenced the rise of American feminism and is referred to by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Thanks to the author for bringing forth more stories of forgotten influential women.
October 24, 2025
Say “Transcendentalism” and everyone immediately thinks (if they still think of Transcendentalism at all) of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and perhaps Bronson Alcott. Folks are less likely to think of Mary Moody Emerson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Sophia Peabody, Lydia Jackson Emerson, and Margaret Fuller. These five women were important figures in the formation, spread, and eventual skepticism of Transcendentalism. Author Randall Fuller devotes separate chapters to each in turn, which results in a bit of overlap and repetition, but his writing is nevertheless quite engaging. He treats his subjects with the respect they deserve, without ever turning the book into a panegyric.
July 19, 2025
I was so excited to read this book, covering 5 of the women involved in the Transcendentalist movement, that i purchased both the Kindle and Audible versions. And a good thing, as I increasingly kept referring back and forth between formats in a vain attempt to follow the continuity. I agree with the review by Kristi, posted earlier. Even the overall structure of beginning each major segment at (Chapter?) 1 makes it very difficult to keep one's place, especially with bookmarks. I didn't actually finish this group biography and wish I had borrowed it from the library before purchasing.
May 26, 2025
This is a very good book. Exhaustive research and exhausting to read. So much under reported local women of history. It wasn't difficult but was at the same time. It prompts me to think I should find a course that focuses on the transcendental women, who were as important as and in some cases more important then the transcendental men. To learn that there were women writing about equal rights in the 1790's is eye opening. I've noted their writings and hope to find them to read.
May 7, 2025
One of the things I really liked about this book is the references to places in New England, especially Boston and Western Massachusetts for example, some of the towns are named after some of the people in the books, like Alston.
The book flowed nicely and was well performed
The book flowed nicely and was well performed
June 27, 2025
Interesting read
I really enjoyed this book. I’m familiar with the American Bloomsbury group, Emerson, Alcott and Thoreau but never heard much about the women. History unfairly belongs to men. It was refreshing to read about these brilliant women who were ahead of their time.
I really enjoyed this book. I’m familiar with the American Bloomsbury group, Emerson, Alcott and Thoreau but never heard much about the women. History unfairly belongs to men. It was refreshing to read about these brilliant women who were ahead of their time.
August 26, 2025
A fascinating group biography of the women who were the fore-mothers of the women’s movement: Mary Moody Emerson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Lydia Jackson Emerson and Margaret Fuller. Well-researched but a trifle too dense for fluid reading.
Want to read
April 18, 2025Review in 4-18-2025 WSJ, might be good for book club too.
June 9, 2025
Really interesting to learn about the women who shaped the development of transcendentalism. Nice that they are finally getting the recognition they deserve.
Read
July 27, 2025Excellent book, filling in the cracks of the story of Transcendentalism.
September 7, 2025
Fantastic book about a period I wasn't familiar with and women who should be more well known.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews