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Thoreau's Feminine Foe
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
As Henry Seidel Canby pointed out in his life of Thoreau fifteen years ago, there is a strange gap in the biography of Thoreau that has never been filled. In Sanborn's edition of the Familiar Letters of Thoreau (Boston, 1894), there is a letter of 14 November 1847 to Emerson, traveling in England at the time, stating in part:
I have had a tragic correspondence, for the most part all on one side, with Miss _____ She did really wish to—I hesitate to write—marry me—that is the way they spell it. Of course I did not write a deliberate answer—how could I deliberate upon it? I sent back a distinct No, as I have learned to pronounce after considerable practice, and I trust that this No has succeeded. Indeed I wished that it might burst like hollow shot after it had struck and buried itself, and make itself felt there. There was no other way. I really had anticipated no such foe as this in my career. (p. 166)
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- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1954
References
1 Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939), pp. 260 ff.
2 For this and much of the following information on the Foord family I am indebted to Mrs. Grace B. Baker, librarian of the Dedham (Mass.) Historical Society, who has searched the Foord family records there for me, and to Mr. J. Seymour Nicholl, Jr., of Wellesley, Mass., who has given me a copy of his privately printed Descendants and Ancestors of Nathaniel Smith, Jr. and Mary Elizabeth Phillips and answered many of my questions about the Foord family.
3 Brook Farm: Historic and Personal Memoirs (Boston: Arena, 1894), p. 49. I am indebted to Mr. Stephen T. Riley, librarian of the Massachusetts Historical Society, for checking the Brook Farm records for me.
4 Margaret Lathrop, The Wayside (New York: American Book Co., 1940), p. 73.
5 Odell Shepard, Pedlar's Progress (Boston: Little, Brown, 1937), p. 388.
6 Clara Endicott Sears, Bronson Alcott's Fruitlands (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915), p. 140.
7 Ednah D. Cheney, Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals (Boston: Roberts, 1889), p. 42.
8 Annie M. L. Clark, The Alcotts in Harvard (Lancaster, Mass.: Clark, 1902), p. 41.
9 There is a facsimile reproduction of this chart opposite p. 8 in Honore Willsie Morrow, The Father of Little Women (Boston: Little, Brown. 1927).
10 Caroline Ticknor, May Alcott, A Memoir (Boston: Little, Brown, 1928), pp. 21-22.
11 The Journals of Bronson Alcott (Boston: Little, Brown, 1938), p. 178.
12 Caroline Ticknor, p. 22; The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Columbia, 1939), iii, 343, 347, 358.
13 Canby, p. 268. I might add that since the publication of Canby's book I have discovered that in the Catalogue of the William Harris Arnold Collection (New York: Anderson Galleries, 1924), p. 238, a large part of the paragraph from Thoreau's letter is quoted, giving the name “Miss Ford,” thus proving that the name was deleted by Sanborn in Familiar Letters. I have been unable to locate the original MS. of the letter. Two other clues to this little-known romance in Thoreau's life have lain unnoticed in print for many years. Annie Russell Marble, in her Thoreau: His Home, Friends & Books (New York: Crowell, 1902), p. 218, states, “His friends assure us that two women were quite willing, even anxious, to link their lives with his.” (I have no idea as to the identity of the second woman.) And F. B. Sanborn, in a footnote to Bronson Alcott at Alcott House, England (Cedar Rapids, Iowa: Torch Press, 1908), p. 100, says, “Miss Ford … was an admirer of Henry Thoreau, as few women were at that time.”
14 Wyman, I, 130-131.
15 I am indebted to Mr. John L. Cooley of Pleasantville, New York, the present owner of the MS., for sending me the following excerpts from this unpublished letter and to Mr. Frederic Wolsey Pratt of Concord, Mass., for giving me the permission of the Alcott heirs to publish it.
16 Boston Transcript, 3 April 1885. I am indebted to Mr. Anton Kovar of Arlington, Mass., for searching the Boston newspapers for me, for checking the Dedham court records, and for photographing her gravestone.
17 I am indebted to Mr. John Cooley for transcribing this letter for me. There is a tradition in the Foord family that Miss Alcott also wrote some poems in tribute to Miss Foord, but they apparently were never published and I have been unable to find any trace of them.