Peabody Sisters and ECE

05/11/2005

If an elephant can be angry, so can the wood ant.
African Proverb

When Edna Ranck suggested I check out the child care story in the April 2005 issue of W magazine I admit to being skeptical. Then I started paging through page after page of bizzaro ads for Gucci, Viktor & Rolf, and Burberry Brit, and I was really starting to lose heart. But lo and behold, in the midst of all this unabashed commercialism, was this intriguing review of Megan Marshall's book, The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005). These sisters, in fact, seem to have been extremely intriguing individuals. Here are some excerpts from the review to whet your appetite...

"Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody published and translated books, ran schools, and hobnobbed with Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne (who married Sophia)...All three girls studied languages and literature from a young age. Elizabeth even taught herself Hebrew at the age of 12 so she could read the Old Testament....Elizabeth, the eldest, was perhaps the most prolific of the three. She published some of Hawthorne's earliest works, owned a foreign language bookshop ...and founded America's first kindergarten. Middle sister Mary, also a teacher, went on to marry educator Horace Mann. The couple was so dedicated to their vocation that they spent their honeymoon touring schools, asylums and prisons in Europe. Sophia wa a tatented landscape and portrait painter whose work hung alongside the great New England painters of the day..."

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