THE EMERSON CIRCLE PRESENTS SUSAN CHEEVER

On March 13, members of the Emerson Circle gathered in a crowded Ware Room to hear a presentation by Susan Cheever, the author of an acclaimed book, American Bloomsbury, about a cluster of American literary giants in 19th century Concord, Massachusetts. The Emerson Circle group was joined by a number of members of the Women’s Reading Group who had read and discussed this book during February.

Susan Cheever began by explaining what had attracted her to the idea of writing about the lives of that particular group of writers in a kind of group biography. It started when she was commissioned to write a preface to a new edition of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. She discovered early in her research that the family home of Bronson Alcott, Louisa May’s father, was in Concord and literally surrounded by the homes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, while others in the vicinity included Henry James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Horace Mann. Feminist writer Margaret Fuller was also a frequent visitor in Emerson’s home.

Further research revealed that this group of future authors were connected in a circle of friendship with other authors of American literary masterpieces, such as Henry Ward Beecher, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville, a member of our church when he lived in New York. As Susan Cheever writes on the first page of her book, these men and women collaborated with each other and provided “the ideas about men and women, nature, education, marriage and writing that shape our world today.”

In the idyllic rural setting of Concord and its surrounding area, these individuals who had come together there at the invitation of Ralph Waldo Emerson, interacted socially, intellectually, sometimes romantically in an atmosphere that promoted their literary influence on future American writers. Emerson, who had inherited a fortune from his first wife, sustained a number of them financially thus enabling them to pursue their writing. Without Emerson’s help and encouragement, Thoreau might never have written about Walden Pond, and a young Louisa May could not have used her childhood crush on her young neighbor and teacher, Henry Thoreau, as a basis for two important characters in her masterpiece, Little Women, and the later Jo’s Boys.

Because Emerson was such a pivotal force within the Concord cluster of writers, he is the center of Susan Cheever’s engrossing book and a fitting subject for an Emerson Circle program that primarily reads Emerson’s own writings.
 

The Angie Henry Utt
Lecture