Included in this “ministerial dynasty” was Mary's great uncle Joseph Moody, who appeared before his congregation with a handkerchief covering his face—the inspiration for the protagonist in Nathaniel Hawthorne's story "The Minister's Black Veil".
[8] Separated from her mother and siblings, reared with little social interaction and meager formal education, she wrote that her life in Malden was a "slavery of poverty & ignorance & long orphanship […and] lonesome solitude".
[14] Though burdened with innumerable daily chores including the care of an infirm grandmother and an insane aunt, Mary Emerson found time to read voraciously.
[16] Denied the Harvard education available to her brother and other male relatives both past and present, Mary Emerson made the seeking of personal truth and knowledge a central concern in her life.
[18] Mary Moody Emerson lived in Malden until 1791, when she moved to her sister Hannah's home in Newburyport to help care for that family's ten children.
She felt optimistic at this point in her life and declared that leaving her situation in Malden was an "awful moment wh divide[d] the polluted past from the spotless, the tremendous future".
[19] After Newburyport, the seventeen-year-old Mary began a sort of occupation as an on-call nanny and nurse for various relatives which was to provide her room and board and keep her busy and moving around New England for many years.
[24] "Doubt[ing] the advantage of marriage in a woman's life",[25] Mary eschewed her expected role as wife and mother, instead choosing "[r]eading, writing, and conversing [as] her vocations".
[26] In 1809, Mary Emerson invested her modest inheritance from her Aunt Ruth (who died in 1808) in a 150-acre farm close to the White Mountains near Waterford, Maine, which she called Elm Vale.
Mortgage obligations, disputes over the property, and her own intermittent desire for new stimulation prompted Mary to spend long periods—from months to years—visiting, boarding, and working as care-giver elsewhere.
Although she seemed to enjoy the intellectual and physical stimulation of traveling, proclaiming, "I had rather live a wandering life & die a beggar,…than drag down to active littleness",[29] Mary Emerson missed her farm when away and wrote often of "pitifully […] saying good-bye" when departing.
William, Ralph Waldo, Edward, Robert (who was mentally retarded), and especially the youngest boy Charles came to consider their Aunt Mary a surrogate father, since she helped generate income, took charge of their spiritual as well as intellectual education, and pushed them to excel.
Her nephew Charles understood the complex nature of her beliefs and wrote that his aunt was "no statute-book of practical commandments, nor orderly digest of any system of philosophy, divine or human, but a Bible, miscellaneous in its parts, but one in its spirit".
[48] Because both her reading and social circle were often theologically liberal, Mary Emerson eventually developed a faith that combined “orthodoxy with the more rational and evangelical tendencies alive in her day”.
[51] Furthermore, Unitarianism (the chosen faith of both her brother William Emerson and, initially, his son Ralph Waldo) lacked the rapture and "fiery depths" necessary for a sublimely personal relationship with God.
Nancy Craig Simmons, the editor of Mary Emerson's selected letters, called her style "baroque" and complained that "its exuberance often preclude[d] clarity".
Although she claimed that her Almanack was an intimate "conversation with [her] chamber", a letter to herself "when unable to think", and a "portion of the history of a soul",[65] she none-the-less allowed her nephew Waldo and certain other relatives liberal access to her notebooks.
Emerson's own journals (which he began as a teenager upon her urging) were filled with transcriptions of his aunt's writing, and he later copied many hundreds of excerpts from her diary entries, letters, and remembered conversation into four "carefully paginated and indexed" notebooks totaling almost 900 pages.
[66] After a day spent reading and copying his aunt's writing, Emerson claimed that all the education and learning in the world would never enable a person "to anticipate one thought or expression" of hers—her style and ideas were that "new, subtle, frolicsome, […and] unpredictable".
[69] Ralph Waldo Emerson had trouble defining the potency of his aunt's writing and finally acknowledged that it was "inimitable, unattainable by talent, as if caught from some dream".
Dissolve the body and the night is gone, the stars are extinguished, and we measure duration by the number of our thoughts, by the activity of reason, the discovery of truths, the acquirement of virtue, the approach to God.
Nothing can excel the freedom & felicity of her letters,—such nobility is in this self rule, this absence of all reference to style or standard: it is the march of the mountain winds, the waving of flowers, or the flight of birds".
Buried at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts, Mary's body—her "tedious tabernacle"—was finally placed into a "cool, sweet grave", freeing her soul to ascend to Heaven.
[78] Although she wrote in her journal, "I am resigned to being nothing, never expect a palm, a laurel, hereafter",[79] since her death she has achieved a sort of secular transcendence among certain academics, scholars, and historians as a notable nineteenth-century American figure.