Miss Peabody’s Book Room, at 13 West Street in Boston, was no ordinary bookstore. It was a place of intellectual pilgrimage. Inspired by the German Romantic thinkers, Elizabeth Peabody — who knew 10 languages before the age of 25 and had devised her own interpretation of the Scriptures — was determined to “move the mountains of custom and convention” and create a space where ideas could disseminate and lives transform. If the Transcendentalist movement conjures up images of Ralph Waldo Emerson ruminating in his study, or Henry David Thoreau shivering on the banks of Walden Pond, it looks rather different, Randall Fuller argues in “Bright Circle,” if you consider Peabody’s bookshop, instead, as its center — its presiding ideal not solitude, but communality.
From 1840, Peabody’s became the meeting place for a motley group of women, aged between 13 and 60, who came together simply to talk. These “conversations” were the brainchild of Margaret Fuller, a free-spirited critic and editor widely considered the best-read woman in New England, who believed, writes the author (a very distant relation), that “the individual came into radiant being” through interaction.
These women were hungry for knowledge; excluded from formal education, they had pursued their own courses — plying ministers with questions, devising reading programs, initiating correspondences — and the conversations provided them with much-desired structure, motivation and solidarity.
If sessions began with discussions of literature, Greek mythology and philosophy, it was Fuller who tended to bring the debates around to the topics of girls’ education, marriage and motherhood, and the unrealized potential she saw among her female peers. “What were we born to do?” she urgently asked the group. “How shall we do it?”
The conversations — which one participant called “a vindication of woman’s right to think” — became the basis of Fuller’s groundbreaking book, “Woman in the Nineteenth Century”; they were, “Bright Circle” suggests, the foundations of the American women’s rights movement.
“Bright Circle” brings together five women associated with Transcendentalism — a school of thought that arose in mid-19th-century Massachusetts guided by some key tenets: a desire to connect with God through an intense encounter with the natural world; a commitment to the individual spirit; a resistance to conformity; and a sense that all people possessed the capacity to experience divine inspiration, if they nurtured the imagination to perceive it. Some of these women were related, by blood or marriage; they read one another’s writings and sensed affinities, both in their thinking and in their subordinate societal position.
Each is given her own chapter (leading to some repetition, where lives overlap). The eldest, the Concord-born Mary Moody Emerson, Ralph Waldo’s aunt, was, writes Fuller, “determined to live beyond the restrictions of gender.” Her “Almanacks” record her lifelong belief that connection to God was personal and intuitive, strengthened through attention to one’s own perceptions.
Sophia Peabody (Elizabeth’s sister, who later married Nathaniel Hawthorne) was one of the first women in the country to earn an income through painting; her “Cuba Journal,” replete with sumptuous descriptions of the landscape, is considered the earliest example of Transcendentalist nature writing, anticipating Thoreau’s “Walden” and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Nature” by several years.
Both she and Lydia Emerson, who married Ralph Waldo, sustained their marriages by compromising their own intellectual talents. Lydia — a staunch abolitionist, committed to the rights of women and animals — came to consider Transcendentalism’s doctrine of self-sufficiency hypocritical, relying as it did on the domestic labor without which these men’s lives of peaceful contemplation would crumble.
The men play minor roles here — perhaps too minor, as it’s sometimes hard to see why these brilliant women found them so alluring. Emerson comes off particularly badly, practically plagiarizing his aunt Mary’s writings, and being shown up by his wife’s far more progressive stance on slavery.
By the early 20th century, Fuller writes, Transcendentalism’s legacy had solidified around its male practitioners, while the women were “reduced to caricatures who stood at the fringes.” Fuller’s avowedly revisionist account assumes a reader more familiar with the men’s work than the women’s.
But, arguably, this is no longer the case. For decades, feminist scholars have worked to reassert the women’s centrality to the movement: See Phyllis Cole’s pioneering work on Mary Moody Emerson, and Megan Marshall’s wonderful biographies of the Peabody sisters and Margaret Fuller (whose writings, in 2025, will receive a Library of America edition, nearly two centuries after she died in a shipwreck, along with the manuscript of her history of the Roman Revolution). The legacy-building was set in motion by Elizabeth Peabody herself, who doggedly transcribed the group’s conversations when Fuller worried that talk was too ephemeral to make a historical impact.
These strident, provocative, eccentric, determined women can no longer justly be left out of any narrative of this movement. Reading about their lives together — and, in particular, the pleasure they found in one another’s examples — makes for a stark indictment of the society that put obstacles in the way of their self-expression.
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