I have been looking for books to help improve my background in literature and was excited to find The Emerson Circle that talks about important early-American writers who surrounded Ralph Waldo Emerson. Although this book dwelt a bit longer on their personal histories and less on their writing, it was still a useful introduction.
A number of years ago, an Esperanto friend from Chile and his wife were visiting the Boston area. I drove in to spend a day with them and do a little sightseeing. I thought my friend, who is a bibliophile, might appreciate visiting Walden Pond and the Thoreau museum. I didn’t know much about it, but I had seen signs driving past Concord.
When we visited, we also drove to the Old North Bridge to see some of the Revolutionary War sights. I was surprised to see signs for Emerson’s house. And Louisa May Alcott’s house. I was completely unaware of the connections among these authors.
I did know a bit about Thoreau. My father had read his work and I had at least a passing familiarity with it. But I didn’t know anything about the museum. Or his life. Or the other people in Emerson’s circle. Some, like Nathanial Hawthorne, I was aware of (We read The Scarlet Letter in high school). Others, like Margaret Fuller, I was wholly ignorant of.
After my visit to the museum, I read some of Thoreau’s writing and wrote about it in my blog. I think that post still stands up pretty well, thirteen years later.
I was a bit disappointed with the first half of Nichols’ book. Partly, I think it assumed the reader would know more about the authors than I did. It also had a tendency to dwell on the minutiae of their lives: How many times this child was struck on the palm with a ferule. Which house they lived in this year or that. I found a lot of that pretty tedious.
I was looking for the ideas in their writing and how those ideas were passed back and forth. But the book seemed to expect that of course the reader would have read all their works beforehand. Since I had not, I needed to read between the lines quite a bit until I had picked up enough background knowledge to begin to fill in the gaps.
The second half of the book was closer to what I was looking for. There was more discussion of how the writers were responding to the important issues of the day: suffrage, abolition, the Civil War, etc. And it contrasted the types of writing that the different authors were publishing on the issues.
The book also got me to reflect on the various author’s communities I belong to. This fall, I’m hoping to spend more time reading the works nominated for the Nebula Awards which will help me gain a better understanding of the people in my community. Now that I’m retired, I finally have more time and energy to devote to reading. And I’ll also look for more books like The Emerson Circle to provide me with introductions to other important groups of historical authors.
