Professor Kate Culkin explores the lives of Ellen Tucker Emerson and Edith Emerson Forbes in her new book, “Emerson’s Daughters”
Congratulations to Dr. Kate Culkin (Professor and Deputy Chair) on her new book Emerson’s Daughters: Ellen Tucker Emerson, Edith Emerson Forbes, and Their Family Legacy (University of Massachusetts Press, 2025).
The book charts the lives of Ellen Tucker Emerson and Edith Emerson Forbes, who were were the daughters of Lidian Jackson and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The sisters grew up in the heart of Concord, Massachusetts’s famed literary community. This is the first book-length work on Ellen and Edith, and therefore recovers a less well-known chapter of Women’s History in the United States.
Emerson’s Daughters is a biography of a sisterhood, the first full-length study of Ellen’s and Edith’s lives. Building on archival research into the extensive correspondence between the sisters, it adds to the growing body of work on women’s contribution to Transcendentalism while opening a window onto the rich, and understudied, family life of the “Sage of Concord.”
Dr. Culkin is Professor of History at BCC, and her research focus is nineteenth-century Women’s History in the United States. She is the author of Harriet Hosmer: A Cultural Biography (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010).
Read more about Dr. Culkin’s research process, and why this work is so important — especially now — via the CUNY Graduate Center where Dr. Culkin teaches in their M.A. Biography and Memoir Program.
You can learn more about the book here.
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