Bright Circle

In November 1839, a group of women in Boston formed a conversation society "to answer the great questions" of special importance to women. The lives and works of the five women who discussed these questions are at the center of Bright Circle, a group biography of thinkers and artists who played pathbreaking roles in the transcendentalist movement. Transcendentalism remains the most important literary and philosophical movement to have originated in the United States. Most accounts of it, however, trace its emergence to a group of intellectuals (primarily Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau) dissatisfied with their religious, literary, and social culture. Yet there is a forgotten history of transcendentalism that features women who were central to the development of the movement. Bright Circle is intended to reorient our understanding of transcendentalism. It recounts the lives of Mary Moody Emerson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Lydia Jackson Emerson, and Margaret Fuller. Many ideas once considered original to Emerson and Thoreau are shown to have originated with women. Together, the women of Bright Circle helped form the foundations of American feminism.