Hawthorne in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life,Drawn from Recollections,Interviews, and Memoirs by Family,Frie

[ First Years of Marriage at the Old Manse, 1842– 1845]

[36] [First Years of Marriage at the Old Manse, 1842–1845] [Sophia Amelia Peabody Hawthorne] After nearly a century-and-a-half of being overshadowed by the reputation of her illustrious husband, Sophia Amelia Peabody Hawthorne (1809–1871) may be finally coming into her own. An artist, author, editor of her husband’s unpublished writings after his death, Transcendental thinker, and devout person, Sophia was an unusually gifted woman of her time. She overcame the invalidism of her childhood and an enforced exile to Cuba for her health from 1833 to 1835, developed into an accomplished artist, encouraged her husband’s literary career and served as the couple’s social front from the time they began courting in 1838 until Nathaniel’s death in 1864, bore and raised three children, patiently endured financial hardship for much of her married life, and followed her husband wherever he found opportunities to produce income. The first serious—though flawed—portrayal of her character appeared in son Julian Hawthorne’s Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (1884); the next occurred in 1950, when Louise Hall Tharp published The Peabody Sisters of Salem. More recently, Megan Marshall’s The Peabody Sisters (2005) has restored Sophia’s position as an intellectual and artistic force who, along with her sisters Elizabeth and Mary, ignited the Romantic and Transcendental impulses of their time, and in Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: A Life (2004), Patricia Dunlavy Valenti has paid Sophia the ultimate tribute: she has treated her as a serious subject in the initial volume of a biography that takes her life up to 1847. Because groundbreaking treatments of the Peabody sisters generally and Sophia specifically are just now appearing, there is every reason to expect that future studies will restore them fully to the history that each of them participated in making. The selection that follows was edited from the manuscript by Valenti in 1996. Valenti drew the text from Sophia’s entries in Nathaniel’s notebooks, where they initially served as her private reflections on the first months of their marriage but quickly became the basis to a journal conversation between husband and wife. The passages printed here are limited to those that Sophia began to write within days of her wedding in July 1842, continued through the birth of daughter Una in March 1844, and ended in October 1845, when the [36] [36] XZ Sophia Amelia Peabody Hawthorne [37] couple vacated the Old Manse. Although Sophia’s prose has bothered some readers as overly sentimental, we include it here as a means to allow her a voice of her own in this volume. For while Sophia is a presence in many of the selections we print, her voice is ultimately silent in them. Here, Sophia comes alive as an unexpectedly passionate woman who is very much in love. Her literary art transforms the Manse and the larger Concord community of her first three years of marriage into a personal, enchanting Eden, where Nathaniel is “Adam,” “The Bright One,” who lights her life as well as her way on their frequent walks together. If Sophia appears too passionate, so does Nathaniel, and he perhaps exceeds his wife’s passion—at least in her eyes—as he daily collects flowers to freshen the house she is decorating with her paintings, rows her on the Concord River in the skiff they purchased from Thoreau and christened the “Water Lily,” tends their vegetable and fruit gardens, reads to her every afternoon or evening, and writes to her almost daily whenever he is absent from home. What follows, then, is a unique idyll of one nineteenth-century marriage in which the honeymoon, as Nathaniel and Sophia’s friends acknowledge, never really ended. Among those mentioned in the circle of family members, friends, and acquaintances are a number of the Hawthornes’ old friends and newer Transcendentalist acquaintances, including Cornelia Romana Hall Park, the Peabody sisters’ friend; Abigail (Abba) May Alcott, Anna and Louisa May Alcott, and Junius Alcott, Bronson’s wife, daughters, and younger brother, respectively; Samuel Gray Ward, a friend of Emerson and Fuller, who was married to Anna Hazard Barker Ward; Maria Louisa Hawthorne, Nathaniel’s younger sister; Jack Flint, who worked the farm to the north of the Old Manse; Maria King Prescott, Timothy Prescott’s widow, who lived across from the Old Manse with her daughter, Abby (Abba) Prescott; Martha Lawrence Prescott, Timothy Prescott’s daughter by a previous marriage, and John Shepard Keyes, a Concord attorney and Emerson...