CHAPTER 1

“She Was Home to Me”

SHE WAS BORN Marian Hooper on September 13, 1843. But everyone called her Clover. For her mother, Ellen Sturgis Hooper, the arrival of this youngest daughter seemed unexpected and lucky, like a four-leaf clover. She delighted in telling stories of Clover’s precocity, reporting how the baby, not yet a year old, would “stick out one finger and say ‘Hark!’” She called the little girl with wide eyes “Clovy” and “my blessed Clover,” telling her father that “Clover is inestimable.” She admitted to a fierce maternal bond, an emotion not without peril, given that one in five children in midcentury America died before the age of five. But Ellen couldn’t help herself. She was besotted with Clover, finding it hard to be away from her even for a short time. “I don’t want to tend her all the time,” she admitted to one of her sisters, “but I can’t bear to lose an hour of her youthful foxiness.”

Clover’s mother, full of affection, was also known for her “wit, her sense of the ridiculous, her keen and quick perceptions.” Though she’d been raised in enormous privilege, her manner was direct and democratic. One of her servants recalled that “Mrs. Hooper always appeared in her kitchen just the same as she did in company.” A small woman, she spoke in a low, quiet voice. A lithographic portrait shows delicate features framed by raven hair that she carefully parted straight down the middle, in keeping with the style of the day. A hint of a smile doesn’t undo the sadness in her shining dark eyes, which slant subtly downward.

But her sadness did not signal an overly delicate temperament. Clover’s mother had strength and, more than that, a remarkable curiosity and capacity for learning. The feminist writer Margaret Fuller, two years older and her close friend, thought Ellen had a mind “full of genius” that was “exquisitely refined.” Another friend observed that she was someone “whose character seemed in constant process of growth,” attributing this capacity to her having “conquered . . . what is most difficult of all things to conquer—a constitutional tendency to depression.” Her struggle, though “hard to bear,” had “given depth and breadth and height to her character.”

Ellen Sturgis was born in Boston in 1812 to a home marked by tragedy. She was the oldest daughter of Captain William Sturgis and Elizabeth Davis, the daughter of Judge John Davis, a U.S. district judge for Massachusetts. Captain Sturgis, who had been a “Cape-Cod boy,” had decided, as had his father before him, “to follow the sea.” He was an extraordinarily capable seaman, a kind of prodigy who commanded a large trading ship, the Caroline, between the Northwest Territories and China when he was not yet twenty. He was also gifted in languages and learned to speak with the fur-trading native tribes along the Pacific coast. By 1810, the year of his marriage, Captain Sturgis was a founding partner of Bryant and Sturgis, a firm that soon controlled over half the trade between Boston, the Northwest Territories, and China.

Six Sturgis children were born over the next fifteen years: William Junior, Ellen, Anne, Caroline, Mary, and Susan. Captain and Mrs. Sturgis prized education for all their children. William Junior went first to Sandwich Academy on Cape Cod, boarding with his mother’s sister and her husband, the Reverend Ezra Goodwin. He continued on at the newly formed Round Hill School in Northampton in western Massachusetts, a boys’ boarding school modeled after the German gymnasium. Ellen and her younger sisters were schooled in Hingham, fifteen miles south of Boston, at a boarding school run by two sisters, Elizabeth and Margaret Cushing. The curriculum in Hingham was similar to that of Round Hill—Ellen studied Latin, French, chemistry, astronomy, rhetoric, and Greek history, which was her favorite subject.

Ellen was particularly close to her older brother. Reading before the age of five, William was by age ten studying with the young Harvard-educated Reverend Warren Goddard, an early convert to Swedenborgian theology. As a way to teach the classics, Goddard had his young students at Sandwich Academy copy out long passages from Homer and Shakespeare, a task William undertook with a meticulous hand. He reported back to his parents in Boston that he enjoyed his school “very much.” “I want to stay here,” William wrote, adding with a measure of pride that he had already translated “450 lines of Virgil.”

But the enormous promise of the young man went tragically unfulfilled. In 1827, at sixteen, after attending Harvard for a single year, William Junior drowned in a freak accident on a mail boat off the coast of Provincetown, after being thrown overboard by a loose boom. Mrs. Sturgis reacted to the loss of her only son with unbridled grief. Her behavior over time became increasingly troubled, her letters a frantic sequence of random biblical quotations and spiritual sayings, a wrestling with darkness. Searching for some way to make sense of her loss, by 1831 Mrs. Sturgis withdrew from the family home at 52 Summer Street and lived instead with her sister and husband, who had no children, on Cape Cod, then in the Boston suburb of Brookline, as if the sight of her husband and children had become simply too painful to bear. Her daughters traveled back and forth between Boston and Brookline to see her. When Caroline, who was seven years younger than Ellen (and named after her father’s first ship), visited her mother in Brookline much later, she found her “walking up and down her darkened rooms with her gaze bent upon the floor as if fixed there.” From time to time, Mrs. Sturgis would return home, only to flee again, unable to endure for any length of time the emotional demands of family life.

Captain Sturgis forbade anyone to speak about the tragedy that had befallen his family. Practicality and a personal toughness had enabled him to survive the hardships he’d endured on the way to making his fortune. He was austere, not given to self-examination or outward expressions of personal feeling. He neither drank nor smoked, and though he had traveled the world, he collected no paintings or other artwork, a disinclination unusual for someone of his social standing and economic means. His motto for his children—one he enforced—was that they must learn to take care of themselves. His values had endowed him with tenacity and determination, but these qualities did little to help him understand his wife’s behavior or comfort her in her distress. Captain Sturgis implored his wife to take her place beside him; at the same time, he remained uncomprehending of her unbounded grief for their son, so he turned to his daughters (and later his grandchildren) for consolation and a shared family life. In the mid-1840s, he bought a large summer house in Woburn, near Horn Pond, where he enjoyed being outdoors with his daughters and seven grandchildren and sailing on the pond.

The Sturgis sisters, grieving for their older brother and abandoned by their mother, looked to their oldest sister, Ellen, for solace. Though only fourteen years old at the time of her brother’s death, Ellen stepped into the breach as best she could, and over the years she became a de facto mother figure for her younger sisters and a companion for her father, though she herself wrestled with melancholy and low moods. From time to time, Ellen tried to reason with her mother, attempted to understand her plight, but a request she made, to begin an undated letter reporting on family news, measures the distance that had grown between Mrs. Sturgis and her family: “Do take the trouble to read this,” Ellen wrote her mother, clearly not sure whether Mrs. Sturgis would be interested enough to do so. Perhaps of most importance, Ellen urged her sisters not to take their mother’s confounding behavior personally. She was particularly protective of Sue, her mercurial and sensitive younger sister, who was just six years old when their parents separated. “I have not seen her [Mother] for some time,” Ellen explained to Susan on one occasion, preparing her for what she knew would feel like a rejection. “I do not think she feels able to write to you. I know you will feel very sorry to hear this, but you [must] remember Mother has had this depression before and when it is upon her, there is no certainty how long it may continue.” Their mother would remain what Ellen aptly called “a mystery of sorrow.”

Caroline was more pointed about the emotional temperature of her family life, once complaining to Margaret Fuller that the “moment I have anything to do with my own family it seems as if the blast of death had struck me & chilled me to the heart.” Even Ellen, despite how she’d tried to nurture her sisters, did not escape Caroline’s censure; she told Margaret Fuller that her father and her sisters “are really very kind but never for one minute loving.”

 

In the early evening of Monday, September 25, 1837, Ellen Sturgis married Robert William Hooper at King’s Chapel, the first Unitarian church in America. At twenty-five, she was somewhat older than the typical age at which women in her generation married. The young Reverend Ephraim Peabody, who that year was assisting the great Unitarian luminary William Ellery Channing at his nearby Federal Street Church, officiated at the simple ceremony.

There is no record of the Hooper courtship, though the two most likely met through their families. Robert was already a relation by marriage—his older brother, Samuel Hooper, had wed Ellen’s younger sister Anne five years before. Ellen’s elder by two years, Robert (whom Ellen often called William in her letters) was a good match from a prominent family, the seventh of nine children of John Hooper, the owner of the largest bank in Marblehead, Massachusetts. The Hoopers had been in America since 1635, and the family fortune was made in the mid-eighteenth century by Robert’s grandfather, also named Robert Hooper, a merchant known for his “well-balanced character” and his “great energy and far-reaching sagacity.” When he died in 1814, he left his heirs an estate worth over $300,000. The younger Robert did not follow his father and grandfather into business, but chose medicine instead, graduating from Harvard College in 1830 and obtaining his advanced degree in Paris at the Académie Royale de Médecine, where he trained to be an oculist (meaning an ophthalmologist). Oliver Wendell Holmes, a fellow Bostonian and a poet whose son would become a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, was a classmate and close friend. A miniature portrait painted while Robert was studying in Paris shows a sober, perhaps bashful young man with reddish-blond hair, a narrow face, a distinctive long nose, and large, soft blue eyes.

Caroline Sturgis thought Robert too conservative, too staid, too much a man of an earlier generation, not worthy of her oldest sister. Margaret Fuller declared Robert a bore and found it baffling that Ellen, whom she thought had been so “gifted by Nature” with beauty and intellect, had joined herself to a man “so inferior to her,” once referring to Robert as that “dull man to whom [Ellen] had so unhappily bound herself.” Fuller liked to pronounce on her friends’ marriages, either idealizing a union, as she did initially with Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne, or disparaging it, as she did with the Hoopers. In any case, others had a different opinion of the Hoopers. The Reverend Peabody, who knew the couple well, thought the match “one of the happy marriages,” inferring that Robert’s “well-balanced and even temperament” gave support for Ellen’s more “variable feelings to rest upon.” Robert’s caution and his more retiring nature might have seemed dull to Caroline Sturgis and Margaret Fuller but appealing to Ellen, promising ballast after a tumultuous childhood. In any case, their attachment proved powerful. Eight years after they had married, Ellen wrote this to Robert from Boston while he was traveling in Virginia: “You cannot tell how your letter made me feel—I have longed so to be with you that it seems as if I could annihilate space and time to come.” Confessing that she had told her friends of her longing for him, she also reported their bemused response: “People tell me how beautiful it is and laugh at me.” Clearly, Ellen adored her husband.

In the late 1830s and early 1840s, the young Sturgis-Hooper families enjoyed a close weave, living only blocks apart in the fashionable neighborhood east of the Boston Common, near Captain Sturgis’s mansion at 52 Summer Street. Ellen and Robert Hooper lived at 44 Summer Street, between Washington Street and Charles Bulfinch’s New South Church at Church Green; Anne and Sam Hooper lived around the corner of Church Green at 21 South Street. When James Freeman Clarke, the liberal Unitarian preacher known for his knowledge of German philosophy and his passionate commitment to social reform, organized a new congregation, the United Church of the Disciples, in 1841, he asked both Hooper families to join, an invitation they readily accepted.

Secure members of Boston’s social elite, the Sturgis-Hooper families were also part of an extraordinarily fertile movement of new thinking, what Ralph Waldo Emerson called “a search for principles.” Contesting the religious and social certainties of an earlier generation, the movement came to be known as Transcendentalism, a diverse collection of philosophies and attitudes about both the individual and the relationship of the individual to society that centered on the question “How should we now live?” This group of midcentury thinkers, ministers, writers, activists, and teachers coalesced into a somewhat coherent movement that claimed, in the words of one of their leaders, George Ripley, that “the truth of religion does not depend on tradition or on historical facts, but has an unerring witness in the soul.” For Transcendentalists, “there is light . . . which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world.”

Although Robert Hooper sympathized with many key principles of Transcendentalism and especially advocated for social reform that would benefit those less fortunate, he never participated as directly in the intellectual and writing circles of the new movement as did his wife, Ellen, and her sisters Anne and Caroline. The Sturgis sisters were in the first group of two dozen women who joined Margaret Fuller at her weekly “Conversations,” first convened in November 1839 and eventually held in the front room of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s bookshop and subscription library at 13 West Street, a short walk from Robert and Ellen’s home. What started as an experiment in women’s education became increasingly popular with each successive series. Fuller had been educated to, and beyond, the standard for contemporary men of the elite, and she wanted to give women the chance to hone their abilities to think and speak clearly for themselves. Her intent for the first series of discussions, about Greek mythology, theater, and philosophy, was to foster open discussion for women, in the style of Socratic inquiry.

The appropriate role for women was much debated at this time, an outgrowth of the Transcendentalists’ questioning of received religious ideas and the energy and activism of the abolitionists and other reform-minded groups. If religious practice and society needed to change, what part might women play in this transformation? Fuller’s Conversations boldly engaged this issue. Once, when Fuller asked whether there was a distinction between men and women with regard to “character and mind,” Ellen replied that a woman was “instinctive” and had “spontaneously what men have by study, reflection, and induction.” Like her sister Caroline, whom Henry James would later describe as “light, free, somewhat intellectually perverse,” Ellen was curious and unafraid of challenging questions.

But Ellen’s character was not essentially rebellious. Whereas Margaret Fuller would move during her prolific career from the inner world of introspection toward the outer world of social action, a trajectory taken by many Transcendentalists, Ellen stayed within the private realm. Emerson noted in his journals that Ellen “sympathized with the Transcendental movement, but she sympathized even more with the objectors.” When asked by Maria Weston Chapman, the editor of the annual gift book The Liberty Bell, to contribute “some writing” for the abolitionist publication, Ellen declined, replying that if she wished “to give voice to any feelings on the subject of slavery, I should prefer a different channel.”

Ellen turned, instead, to poetry, where she could fully explore confidential moments and everyday feelings. She wasn’t dabbling in the pastime of verse in the way that was then fashionable. Her effort was more serious. She published her poems, as did her sister Caroline, in The Dial, the leading journal of Transcendentalism, founded by Fuller and Emerson in 1840. Like Emily Dickinson, eighteen years her junior, Ellen tried to discover through poetic language something about inner life, about death, about the human condition. She wanted transport: “By all thou causest me to long for, oh my God / I feel how much thou hast to give.” And renewal: “Open thine inner eye, thine inner ear— / A mother’s low and loving under-tone / Breathes through the universe for who can hear.” If hers was a poetry that searched for meaning and solace, her sensibility refused easy answers, attuned as she was to the mystery at the heart of things, what she once called a “world-old harmony.” At the end of a six-stanza poem on death, her most frequent theme, she ponders the life of a “helpless babe” who “could not choose but be” and “Drinks at Creation’s flow, / Then, sudden, vanisheth along / The way we do not know!” A dense, penetrating prose poem that imagines life “a wild dream full of horrors” concludes that “the children of earth groan under the experiences of a life or an age of evil and awake at last deep and safe in the beginning and heart of all—.”

Ellen’s reading of the Romantic poets, most likely Keats, Shelley, and Blake, inspired her choice of topics, but she made such cultural influences her own. An insistent melancholy in her poems, a trace of losses endured and losses anticipated, is balanced with a hard-won realism about the demands of life for a woman. “I slept, and dreamed that life was Beauty; / I woke, and found that life was Duty,” is how she begins her most well-known and frequently anthologized poem. However much Ellen longed for what the educator and writer Elizabeth Palmer Peabody memorably called “a more interior revolution,” she did so under the long shadow cast by a mother who had left her husband and children to somehow save herself. Rescue, Ellen knew too well, was no simple thing. She searched instead for truth and freedom not outside of but within her close domestic circle; in a word, Ellen’s husband and three children were the heart of her life.

 

The Hoopers’ eldest daughter, also named Ellen but called “Nella” or “Nellie,” was born in 1838; Edward, or “Ned,” was born a year afterward; and Clover followed four years later on September 13, 1843. Ellen delighted in her children, writing her husband that they “are very happy together, and so far, it could not go better for them.” Robert jotted down their funny sayings, once recording how Nellie asked him to come and “sit at the parlor window and I’ll count those that pass by on our sidewalk and you those that pass on the opposite one—and we’ll let Clover count the dogs.” But Ellen also worried about the children and took note of their strengths and weaknesses, with an eye toward their improvement. Nellie had a reputation for “a certain bravado” in her manner, as reported to Ellen by her sister, Susan Sturgis, and whenever Nellie stayed with her Hooper relatives, “their entire devotion produces in Nellie an entire self-importance.” Ned was his older sister’s opposite and more like his father—retiring, less skilled with people. His mother could be both pleased with and concerned about him at once: “gracious, ineffable Eddy,” Ellen wrote to Susan, is “one side angel, one side simpleton as usual.”

Clover, with her straight, light brown hair and round eyes, mostly escaped such sorting out in her mother’s letters. The trait her mother made most note of was the young girl’s boundless enthusiasm, as on her fifth birthday, when Clover became “nearly wild with delight” at the “ornamented high cake,” which was topped with a white flag inscribed with her name. Ellen heaped affection on all her children, but she seemed to reserve something extra for her youngest. Once, when anxious about leaving her husband and children for a short trip to New York, Ellen-implored her husband to give hugs to all the children, but gave him special instructions for Clover. “Give kisses,” Ellen wrote, “on her eyes and ears and lips and the tip of her little nose.”

Ellen had developed an inner strength that helped foster the growth of both her sisters and her own children, but she could not defeat her own ill health no matter how hard she tried. Several years before her marriage, Ellen had contracted consumption, at the time the more common name for tuberculosis, and she went through numerous cycles of sickness and remission. The gap between Ned’s birth in 1839 and Clover’s four years later indicates that her illness had flared up for a time—her first two pregnancies may have reignited a simmering tubercular infection. Her illness may also explain why she felt Clover was her “lucky” child—she probably hadn’t anticipated another because of her illness. In any case, by the time Ellen was pregnant with Clover in the spring of 1843, she was in remission, writing in mid-May to her sister Caroline, who was staying for several weeks with the Emersons in Concord, that “I long since abandoned the black couch, am now restored to the usual duties of a mistress and parent and member of society . . . I am getting strong, ride, and walk.”

But Ellen’s letters soon enough vacillate between reporting that she’s feeling better and that she’s feeling worse. “Air, give me air / I am fainting here,” she pleads in an undated poem.

Tuberculosis was the most potent killer in antebellum America, responsible for one-fifth of all deaths. Its symptoms were specific: fatigue, pallor, bloody cough, fever, swollen glands, and dramatic weight loss. But treatments varied greatly. If a total cure remained unlikely, remission always seemed a possibility, within reach of just one more new regimen, one more medicine. Doctors prescribed everything from iodine, mercury, nitric acid, cod liver oil, bed rest, and a bland nutritious diet to vigorous exercise, including riding horseback, which was thought to jostle and clear the lungs. Doctors also recommended a change of climate, particularly when the patient was a well-born New Englander who could afford an escape from damp air and a drafty house.

By early 1848, Ellen and her husband, desperate about the state of her health, fled Boston’s forbidding weather in the hopes that the warmer climate of Savannah, Georgia, might help her condition improve. They took along their oldest children but decided that Clover, not yet five, was too young for the arduous journey and left her behind with her twenty-two-year-old Aunt Susan and grandfather Sturgis, both of whom had a special fondness for the child. After arriving in Georgia, Ellen thanked her sister Susan “for your attentions to my baby—I love to hear all she says.” In April, Ellen asked her father that no one correct Clover’s pronunciation—“I shall be very sorry to find her precocious in that respect when I return”—later exclaiming to him that she was “delighted to hear so good account from my Clover.” In another letter, she included a note for her daughter, who was learning to read. Calling her “my precious silver grey,” the color of a horse, she wrote, “I love you as much as ever. I hear you are well and good.” She added, “I see your little stems of legs trotting up and down stairs.”

Ellen and Robert Hooper expressed a measured hope about her health to her father. Robert wrote first, to say they had made “frequent excursions in the saddle and I think that at each successive one Ellen goes further and returns less fatigued than at the preceding. I perhaps deceive myself but if I do not, Ellen is better than when we left home.” Ellen concurred: “I think I am much better.” She was eager to allay the fears of her father: “I cough hardly at all,” she assured him, “and I hope to throw off the remnant. But I am satisfied it was best to have come.” By mid-June, however, when Ellen went with her family to Horn Pond at Woburn for a stay at her father’s summer home, she was no better. Captain Sturgis worried to Caroline that Ellen “is about the same as when you saw her,” saying, “I hope to get her in a better state by the pure air of Woburn, though I am not free from serious apprehensions about her.”

At a certain point, Ellen knew she was dying. Her poems are filled alternately with the dread of leaving—“Oh no, too soon, too perfect, and too deep / Must come the sleep of Death to my young heart”—and a resolution to find strength in the inevitable: “Now I think I’ve stood so long / By my own cold clay, / I can back with spirit strong / And bear what for me may—.”Ellen asked that her letters be kept for her daughters, hoping her words might one day “have interest” for them, but also gave them permission to set her writing aside—“If they do not wish the trouble of looking them over, they can burn them unread.” She must have been acutely aware that she was leaving her children to an unbridgeable sadness. On Friday, November 3, 1848, Ellen was at home with her husband and her sister Susan at her bedside. There is no record of who else might have been there or where the Hooper children were that day. At four-thirty in the afternoon, Ellen briefly woke and said with a weak voice: “Patience! Patience!” Robert, wishing at this point for his wife to find release after her long illness, asked, “Cannot you go to sleep?” She replied, “It is not time yet.” But a half hour later, at five o’clock, Ellen died. She was thirty-six years old.

Ephraim Peabody, who had officiated at the Hoopers’ wedding eleven years before and who by the time of Ellen’s death had become the minister at King’s Chapel, presided at her funeral. She was buried three days later next to her brother, William Junior, in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, in the Sturgis family plot. A small marble headstone with a rounded top and the etched initials E.S.H. marks her grave. That night, Peabody recalled the events of the day: “To-day I read beside her coffin, amidst her mourning friends, the words of Christ: ‘I am the resurrection and the life.’” He noted that in her last year, beset by discouragement and crushing pain, any easy religious sentiment had been burned away and she had became “almost a mystic.”

Ellen’s youngest sister, Susan, wrote to a close friend in the days following the funeral. “How the sunlight crinkles up the wall in the early afternoon and the nightly shadows fall so heavy on my heart because her low voice is hushed forever.” She spoke of a loss for which she could find no end: “[Ellen] heard my prayers, when I was a child, and took care of me and [then] she was my baby for many years up to the hour I saw her die. She was mother and sister and home to me. She was beautiful and kind and delicate and lovely and she is dead and the world does seem very dark and empty without her and the wound deepens every day.” Reverend Peabody worried about Robert Hooper, imagining that “his saddest days were yet to come” and that memories of the past would not be able to shut out a looming “loneliness of the present.”

To have death settle in so close must have been terrifying to five-year-old Clover. She had neither the capacity to reason nor the comfort of an adult’s religious faith, and, unlike her Aunt Sue, she had no way to make an account of her loss with words. She likely had a child’s belief that wishing can bring back the dead, that magic or good behavior can find a remedy. Clover’s older sister, Ellen, would mention her mother in letters, remembering the sound of her low voice and how she expressed herself. Ned later collected his mother’s poetry and had eight copies of the collection privately printed as a memorial to her. By contrast, there is little record that Clover wrote or talked about her mother.

But when Clover finally started taking photographs thirty-five years after her mother’s death, she often captured images of maternal figures, as if to bring her own mother back into view and back to life.