"Never Till Just These Circumstances Made It Manifest Had I Imagined What a Revealing Power There Were in Acts of Worship": Ellen Tucker Emerson, Religious Curiousity, and Intellectual Engagement

Ellen Tucker Emerson (1839-1909), the daughter of Lidian Jackson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, is primarily known, when acknowledged at all, for her care of her father in his final years, when he suffered from dementia. Descriptions of her often note her piety and selfless nature, with the two qualities regularly tied together. Her eulogy stated, “She loved the church, loved traditions her father could not do,” while also praising her for being “the visible providence of her declining father, at home attentive to his need, faithful to his side when he walked abroad.”  While she was a committed congregant in the Concord First Parish, a Unitarian Church where she taught Sunday School, the emphasis on her piety obscures the intellectual curiosity about other forms of faith that played an important role in her life and in her relationship with her famous father.  Throughout her life, she visited other houses of worship, engaged people in conversations about their faith, and reflected on these encounters in her letters to family and friends. This digital poster, which will include passages from her letters, will examine how Emerson's religious explorations illuminate a way in which religion could be a path to broader intellectual engagement for nineteenth-century women, while also analyzing the reasons why, despite ample written evidence of this engagement in the Emerson papers at the Houghton Library, Ellen Tucker Emerson’s legacy has evolved to obscure it.