Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: A Life, Volume I, 1809–1847, and: The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, and: Reinventing the Peabody Sisters (review)

After reading these three recently published books on the Peabody sisters, no one would question that they were extraordinary women. Beginning with Patricia Dunlavy Valenti's biography of Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, these volumes provide welcome—and needed—complements to the many biographies and literary studies of her husband, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

No longer just the headache-stricken companion to the famous author, Sophia Hawthorne emerges in Valenti's volume "on her own terms," in her multiple roles as daughter, sister, artist, friend, writer, nature-lover, playful sensualist, mother, intellectual companion, and wife (x). To demonstrate Sophia's influence on her husband—surprisingly new territory, as Valenti notes in her preface—Valenti extricates key passages from the "enormous volume of [Sophia's] writing" to illustrate her main argument—that "Sophia's otherness became the creative friction that ignited [some of Nathaniel's] short stories" (x). Valenti highlights the extent of Sophia's influence in part by presenting parallel biographies of Sophia and Nathaniel in alternating chapters up to the point of their courtship, which brings the two strands of narrative together mid-volume (Chapter 11 of 22). The volume does not require previous knowledge of Nathaniel's life, but this reader, at least, was grateful that Sophia's life story is privileged with slightly more chapters.

While readers familiar with Nathaniel's oeuvre might not immediately see the need for Valenti's detailed summaries of his early stories and sketches, ultimately her biographical interpretations of story elements linked to the couple's lives and personal writings are compelling and provocative. Valenti demonstrates, for instance, how in two stories composed in 1844 Nathaniel "harvested" imagery and language from Sophia's Cuba Journal—letters to her mother that describe her eighteen-month sojourn in Cuba (117). She notes a startlingly clear borrowing in "Drowne's Wooden Image" (205), and she suggests that in "Rappaccini's Daughter" Beatrice's purple dress reflects Sophia's purple dress that Nathaniel grew to hate "beyond all endurance" (228). About two years after publication of the story, he requested that she never wear the dress again.

Valenti's portrait of Sophia emphasizes her artistic production and de-emphasizes the debilitation of her infamous headaches, shown in part through letters in which Sophia mentions them only in passing and in the midst of reporting on multiple activities. Most significant is the presence of Sophia's own words—lively, challenging, passionate, vivid, playful, serious—in letters to family and friends as well as in her journals. In the first of two planned volumes, Valenti's presentation of the fullness of Sophia's personality indeed removes her from Nathaniel's shadow.

While Valenti's volume on Sophia focuses on her influence on Nathaniel's writings, Megan Marshall's expansive study of all three Peabody sisters examines their influence on American intellectual history. In particular, as her subtitle declares, Marshall explores how they ignited American Romanticism. It is easy to see why Marshall's prize-winning triple biography—recipient of the Society of American Historians' Francis Parkman Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, and the Massachusetts Book Award in nonfiction, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography and memoir—has garnered such strong recognition: It is elegantly written and meticulously researched.

Marshall's study of the sisters honors each woman individually while situating all three within their intricate web of social connections. The eight-part narrative spans a century, from 1746 to 1843. A prologue set in 1842 and an epilogue in 1843—Sophia's and Mary's wedding days, respectively—frame the...