Emerson, Ellen Tucker, 1839-1909

Second child and elder daughter of philosopher, essayist, poet, and lecturer Ralph Waldo Emerson and his wife Lidian (Lydia Jackson) Emerson, Ellen Tucker Emerson (1839-1909) was a resident of Concord, Massachusetts. She was born at Bush (the Emerson home on the Cambridge Turnpike) and named for her father’s first wife. She attended Elizabeth Sedgwick’s school for girls in Lenox, Massachusetts, the Agassiz School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Frank Sanborn’s school in Concord. Never married, Ellen Emerson was an active community member in her home town—she served on Concord’s School Committee and belonged to the First Parish in Concord (where she taught Sunday school for over forty years) and to other local organizations. She planned and hosted social events, including public dances held in the Town Hall in Concord’s Town House on Monument Square, and looked after her parents as they aged. She traveled to Britain, Europe, and Egypt with her father after Bush burned in 1872, helped him keep his place in his notes as he lectured during his declining years, and assisted James Elliot Cabot (Emerson’s literary executor and biographer) in editing his manuscripts. Her manuscript biography of her mother was edited by Dolores Bird Carpenter and published in 1980; a two-volume edition of her letters edited by Edith E. W. Gregg was published in 1982. Ellen Emerson’s siblings were Edith Emerson Forbes (Mrs. William Hathaway Forbes) of Milton, Massachusetts, and Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson of Concord, both of whom survived her. (Her older brother Waldo, born in 1836, died in 1842.) Ellen Emerson died in Milton early in 1909.