Emerson’s Daughters: Ellen Tucker Emerson, Edith Emerson Forbes, and Their Family Legacy

by Kate Culkin

Ellen Tucker Emerson and Edith Emerson Forbes, the daughters of Lidian Jackson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, grew up in the heart of Concord, Massachusetts’s famed literary community. In a culture that celebrated self-reliance, Ellen and Edith formed a partnership that only strengthened as their paths diverged, with Ellen remaining in the family home and Edith marrying William Forbes, moving to Milton, Massachusetts, and having eight children. The partnership allowed them to tend to the demands and opportunities created by their father’s career, including serving as his secretaries and editors, and helped them shape his posthumous image. It also enabled them to adapt to historical developments stretching from the Civil War to American imperialism as well as personal ones, including Edith’s growing family and travel and study abroad, and inevitable ones brought on by the aging processes of their parents and themselves.



Emerson’s Daughters is a biography of a sisterhood, the first full-length study of Ellen’s and Edith’s lives. Building on archival research into the extensive correspondence between the sisters, it adds to the growing body of work on women’s contribution to Transcendentalism while opening a window onto the rich, and understudied, family life of the “Sage of Concord.” 

298 pages, Paperback

Published July 18, 2025

Reviews

[Kristi · Rating 3 out of 5]

In a long-awaited dual biography of sisters Ellen Emerson and Edith Forbes, Culkin details the lives of Ralph Waldo Emerson's daughters. Culkin's narrative largely derives from the sisters' correspondence with one another, as well as other scholarly sources on the Emerson family. While bringing due attention to the significance of Emerson's daughters — both as individuals and as influences in their father's life and work— in its brevity, this biography largely stays surface, densely recounting life events, without much analysis into the sister's personalities, feelings, and relationships. On occasion, when interpretation is offered, Culkin sometimes makes speculative leaps without presenting enough supportive evidence for the biographers' interpretation of the subject's experience, and the organization of ideas is sometimes disjointed. The book's greatest insights and contributions were perhaps in the concluding chapters, which detail the end of the sister's lives, and wherein this work covers a time period that is not commonly dealt with in published primary sources and other scholarly studies related to their parents and other contemporaries.

[M Soltis · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating look at Ralph Waldo Emerson's family especially after he died. This is strictly an academic look at Emerson's entire family through the framework of correspondence by his daughters, Ellen and Edith. It takes some work to know all the players in this biography since it reads like a "who's who" of Concord and the surrounding area, but it is well worth the effort.

[Eve Kahn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Magisterially researched, elegantly written, and an important shedding of light on two complicated, flawed, driven women long in their father's shadow.

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating and thoughtful as well as complex and insightful exploration of the Emerson daughters. It not only shines a spotlight on their unique lives, but also on the times in which they lived.