![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() She was eighteen when they married Emerson was twenty-four. Death was more familiar and intimate to those living in 1800s America, both literally and figuratively, and Emerson, then a twenty-eight-year-old minister at an important Boston church who had just lost the love of his life, was by many accounts experiencing both a crisis of vocation and faith.Įmerson was a visiting pastor when he met Ellen Louisa Tucker in Concord, New Hampshire in 1827, and he was immediately smitten with her beauty. At least two of Emerson’s contemporaries had done the same thing: a Unitarian minister and good friend of Margaret Fuller’s, James Freeman Clarke, had opened the coffin of a woman he’d been in love with when he was an undergrad, and Edgar Allan Poe’s literary executor, an anthologist named Rufus Griswold, opened the coffin of his dead wife a mere forty days after the funeral. Richardson explains in Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1995), “this was not a grisly gothic gesture,” nor was it the sign of an unhinged lover. He’d been in the habit of walking from his home in Boston to her gravesite in Roxbury, a distance of almost five miles, every day, and had also been writing to her in his journals as if she were still alive. ![]() On March 29, 1832, Ralph Waldo Emerson visited the tomb of his wife, Ellen, and opened her coffin. ![]()
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