You’ve heard of Ralph Waldo Emerson, but there’s a second genius in the Emerson family you’ve probably never heard of. Mary Moody Emerson was “the best writer in Massachusetts,” according to her nephew Ralph. I recently learned about aunt Mary through Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1996), the biography of Ralph Waldo by Robert D. Richardson, Jr.
A mysterious and eccentric woman, Ralph’s aunt embodied prophetic qualities more than conventional authorship. She possessed remarkable physical energy, bursting in and out of rooms with intensity. Her obituary in the Boston Commonwealth noted she had “the power of saying more disagreeable things in half an hour than any person living.” Standing four feet three inches tall, Mary Moody wore a burial shroud while traveling and slept in a coffin-shaped bed. These eccentricities have often overshadowed her intellectual contributions in historical accounts.
Yet her significance transcends conventional literary classification. She lived in lifelong poverty, which she embraced philosophically, and wrote about deprivation’s advantages. She never married, recognizing her life would diverge from societal norms. Rising before dawn daily, she devoted herself to reading and writing. Entirely self-educated, she engaged deeply with Milton, Shakespeare, Cicero, Plato, Plotinus, Coleridge, Marcus Aurelius, and numerous other canonical thinkers, theologians, and philosophers.
She functioned as an idiosyncratic Calvinist theologian of New England character—deeply pietist yet intellectually restless, seemingly perpetually questioning belief itself. She conformed only to personal truth-seeking and resisted secondhand knowledge. Ralph Emerson observed her genius was “always new… unpredictable. All your learning of all literatures and states of society of Platonistic, Calvinistic, English or Chinese would never enable you to anticipate one thought or expression.”
Her four notebooks, reread throughout Emerson’s life, remain unpublished. The Selected Letters of Mary Moody exists but remains difficult to locate. Phyllis Cole’s biography represents the primary scholarly resource on this figure. Mary Moody warrants deeper investigation and I anticipate future scholarly attention.
She consistently advised the Emerson boys: “Always do what you are afraid to do.” Dismissive of gossip and high society opinion, she declared: “Society is like a corpse that purges at the mouth.” She advocated for unflinching speech on all topics, critical engagement with texts, and original perspectives on existence’s fundamental questions regarding life, death, and eternity.