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The Peabody Sisters of Salem by Luise Hall Tharp

Slow, stately biography of three sisters from 1800s-era Massachusetts. The eldest, Elizabeth Peabody, was a well-regarded educator; the middle sister, Mary Peabody, was a teacher and author who became the wife of educator and congressman Horace Mann; and the youngest, Sophia Peabody, was an artist who married author Nathaniel Hawthorne. 

It's not my favorite style of biography when the author attributes thoughts and feelings to each of the characters when there's no way the author can know their thoughts and feelings. This is "James Michener" history, not real history. At the same time, the book gives a competent tour of a kind of birth and early gestation of American literary and artistic culture. 

You'll meet a shy and weird Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was Elizabeth's Greek tutor. You'll learn the circumstances of Nathaniel Hawthorne surprise breakthrough to worldwide literary fame with The Scarlet Letter. You'll meet general (later President) Franklin Pierce, as Hawthorne writes a controversial biography of him. You'll see educator and congressman Horace Mann's career arc as he befriends Elizabeth, marries Mary, wins a seat in Congress, and then goes on to Ohio to found Antioch College. 

You'll see the Peabody sisters mingle with prime movers in the public education movement in the early USA, you'll meet key New England abolitionists, and you'll meet leaders of the socio-philosophical "Transcendentalism" movement, as they attempt to create a self-sustaining agricultural community (the result was about what you'd expect if a group of Brooklyn soy-hipsters tried the same thing today).

Finally, you'll see dynamics common to all families: manipulation, sibling rivalry, and angry disputes over the political issues of the day. Slavery, for example, became a wedge issue in the Peabody family when the youngest sister's abolitionism wasn't sufficiently pure and aggressive enough for the oldest sister's taste. They "ruined their Thanksgiving dinners" arguing about politics too, and I'm unsure if it makes me depressed or sympathetic to know it. 

To read:
Conyers Middleton: Letter from Rome
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter, The Marble Faun

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