Ellen Emerson and the Tubercular Muse

Ellen Louise Tucker Emerson, the first wife of Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote poems and letters during her prolonged struggle against the family curse of tuberculosis, and these relatively unread texts are the subject of Janet M. Anderson's essay. In Anderson's reading, Ellen Emerson's writing serves not only to enrich understanding of her famous husband's life and work, but also stands on its own and gives rise to a revaluation of what has been dismissively labeled sentimentality in nineteenth-century writers confronting the certainty and imminence of their own death.