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Beyond Self-Reliance: Biography, Recovery, and Women’s Contributions to the American Renaissance
Scholars Kate Culkin and Patricia Valenti will discuss the role of biography in recovering the lives and contributions of 19th-century women, in conjunction with the publication of Culkin’s Emerson’s Daughters: Ellen Tucker Emerson, Edith Emerson Forbes, and Their Family Legacy.
Ellen Tucker Emerson and Edith Emerson Forbes were the daughters of Lidian Jackson and the famous philosopher and author Ralph Waldo Emerson. Culkin and Valenti will explore Culkin’s groundbreaking investigations of how, in a culture that celebrated self-reliance, Ellen and Edith formed a partnership that allowed them to serve as their father’s secretaries and editors and shape his posthumous image, while they also pursued their own goals and passions. This talk will address how Culkin’s work, along with Valenti’s on Sophia Peabody Hawthorne (writer Nathaniel Hawthorne’s wife), contributes to the growing understanding of women’s contributions to transcendentalism and the American Renaissance, as well as the critical role biographies play in the recovery of influential but understudied women. Culkin’s book (University of Massachusetts Press, 2025) will be for sale and signing at the event.
Tuesday, September 30
6:30–8:00 pm
St. Paul and St. Andrew United Methodist Church
263 West 86th Street New York, NY 10024
Kate Culkin, Ph.D., is Professor of History at Bronx Community College and on the faculty of the Biography and Memoir MA program at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of Harriet Hosmer: A Cultural Biography and Emerson’s Daughters: Ellen Tucker Emerson, Edith Emerson Forbes, and the Emerson Legacy and was an associate editor of The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers.
Patricia Dunlavy Valenti is Professor Emerita in English at the University of North Carolina Pembroke. An award-winning teacher who held visiting professorships at the US Military Academy and the US Air Force Academy, she is the author of five books and numerous articles on American literature and biography. Her two-volume Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, A Life will be re-issued by Louisiana University Press in 2026.
The images are from the William Munroe Special Collections, Concord Free Public Library.
A sketch of Ellen and Edith Emerson by Caroline Hildrith, c. 1847
Ellen Emerson leads Edith Emerson on Gloriosa, Ellen’s donkey, c. 1870s
Family portrait of the Emersons, 1879