Elizabeth Palmer Peabody

Title

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody

Source

William M. Klimon

Publisher

Center for Norbertine Studies

Birth Date

1804

Death Date

1894

Bibliography

Peabody, one of the most prominent literary women of the 19th-century America, was an early member of the Transcendentalist Club and friends with Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau. She operated a bookstore, which became a center for Transcendentalists, and a publishing venture, which, in 1843, produced an edition of the Confessions based largely on Pusey's translation, but also incorporating elements from an older, unnamed edition (perhaps Challoner's). Praised by Emerson (who thought it merely a reprint of Pusey) and still incorrectly thought to be the first American edition (the first American edition, an otherwise unknown version, was produced by the Baltimore publisher Fielding Lucas, Jr. in 1834), it is undoubtedly the first undertaken by a woman.