An intellectual, she was involved in many social issues of her day, advocating for the abolition of slavery, the rights of women and of Native Americans and the welfare of animals, and campaigned for her famous husband to take a public stand on the causes in which she believed.

Although content, at age thirty-two, with the life of a spinster-aunt who tended a garden and kept chickens, Lydia Jackson accepted Ralph Waldo Emerson's proposal.

[citation needed] Newlyweds Lydia and Ralph Waldo Emerson settled immediately in Concord, in a large white house they named "Bush".

It was here Lydia Emerson would play hostess to a continual stream of dinner and overnight guests throughout the years of her marriage.

[6] Emerson immediately began calling his wife "Lidian" rather than Lydia, possibly to avoid her name being pronounced "Lidiar" as would be common in New England.

Lidian's frequent bouts of illness and chronic fatigue were exacerbated during pregnancy, when it was difficult for her to take proper nourishment due to gastric upset.

He dealt also with the chickens, defeating their raids on the garden by asking Mrs. Emerson to make some shoes of thin morocco to stop their scratching.

[13]Lidian Emerson had outlived her husband by more than ten years, and was buried beside him in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, on Author's Ridge.

"[14] Near the end of his own life, Frank Sanborn described Mrs. Emerson as "a stately, devoted, independent person", with "the air... of a lady abbess, relieved of the care of her cloister, and given up to her garden, her reforms, and her unceasing hospitalities.