Tappan, Caroline Sturgis, 1819-1888

Caroline Sturgis Tappan was a Transcendentalist poet and friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller. Together with her sister Ellen Sturgis Hooper, she contributed verse to the Transcendentalist literary magazine, The Dial.

Caroline Sturgis Tappan (August 30, 1818 – October 20, 1888), commonly known as Caroline Sturgis, or "Cary" Sturgis, was an American Transcendentalist poet and artist.[1][2][3] She is particularly known for her friendships and frequent correspondences with prominent American Transcendentalists, such as Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Sturgis published 25 poems in four different volumes of The Dial, a Transcendental periodical. She also wrote and illustrated two books for children, Rainbows for Children (1847) and The Magician’s Show Box, and Other Stories (1856).[4] Caroline Sturgis was born in Boston, Massachusetts to the former Elizabeth Marsten Davis Sturgis, the second daughter of John Davis, a U.S. District Judge for the District of Massachusetts, and William Sturgis, a former sea captain who rose to become one of the wealthiest and most successful merchants in Boston. As a girl, she attended Bronson Alcott's Temple School, Dorothy Dix's school for girls, and became Margaret Fuller's private student,[9] and she participated in Fuller's Conversations series with her sister Ellen Sturgis Hooper (1812-1848). n 1847, Sturgis married William Aspinwall Tappan, son of abolitionist Lewis Tappan and Susanna Aspinwall, and they had two daughters, Ellen Sturgis Tappan Dixey (b. 1849) and Mary Aspinwall Tappan (1851-1941).[20][21] Mary, with her niece Rosamund Dixey Brooks Hepburn (1887-1948), later donated the family summer home, Tanglewood, in the Berkshires to the Boston Symphony Orchestra.[22][23]