The Almanacks of Mary Moody Emerson: A Scholarly Digital Edition

We’re proud to see Emerson grace the cover of the NEH’s Humanities magazine, Winter 2017, which publishes our article, “‘The Youngest Person in Concord’: Mary Moody Emerson Was a Thinker, a Writer, and an Inspiration to All Who Knew Her.” Thank you to artist Sara Tyson for so beautifully capturing Emerson’s spirit in full ferment.

We are pleased to announce that The Almanacks of Mary Moody Emerson: A Scholarly Digital Edition has been awarded a second Scholarly Editions Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (http://www.neh.gov/news/press-release/2013-07-25). This award of $290,000 allows us to continue editing and encoding Emerson’s unpublished manuscript journals. Sixteen Almanack folders (c. 1804 through 1814, 1821, c. 1822, 1826, October 1855, January and [July] 1858, and two speculatively dated 1804-18teens) have been published and can be accessed in Women Writers Online at http://www.wwp.northeastern.edu/wwo/. Six of these folders can also be viewed in an experimental prototype interface, free to the public and accessible on our website, that provides an initial model of what the future Women Writers Online interface can do with our editorial work: http://www.wwp.northeastern.edu/research/projects/manuscripts/emerson/index.html.

In a June 1830 letter to nephew Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mary Moody Emerson refused to lend him an additional Almanack “fascicle” or hand-made booklet, a frustrated response to his frequent borrowing, reviewing, extracting, and retention of her manuscripts. “I send you an Almanack! ‘Catch me’– Soberly–I will not till you return the others. They are my home–the only images of having existed” (Mary Moody Emerson, The Selected Letters of Mary Moody Emerson, ed. Nancy Craig Simmons [University of Georgia Press, 1993], 287).