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.