Queer Places:
The Old Manse, 269 Monument St, Concord, MA 01742
Tappan House, 297 West St, Lenox, MA 01240
Mount Auburn Cemetery
Cambridge, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, USA
Caroline
Sturgis Tappan (August 30, 1818 - October 20, 1888), commonly known as
Caroline Sturgis, or "Cary" Sturgis, was
an
American Transcendentalist, poet, and artist.[1][2][3]
She had a romantic frienship with
Margaret Fuller.
Caroline Sturgis was born in Boston, Massachusetts to the former Elizabeth Marsten Davis Sturgis (1789-1864), the second daughter of Judge John Davis, a U.S. District Judge for the District of Massachusetts, and William F. Sturgis (1782-1863), a former sea captain who rose to become one of the wealthiest and most successful merchants in Boston.[4][5] Known for her friendships and frequent correspondences with prominent American Transcendentalists, such as Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sturgis published 25 poems in four different volumes of The Dial, a Transcendental periodical. She also wrote and illustrated two books for children, Rainbows for Children (1847) and The Magician’s Show Box, and Other Stories (1856).[6] Bowing to the dictates of her class and its restrictions on gender, Sturgis did not reveal her authorship of these two books, attributing them instead to her friend Lydia Maria Child.[7] She attended Bronson Alcott's Temple School, Dorothy Dix's school for girls, became Margaret Fuller's private student,[8] and she participated in Fuller's Conversations series with her sister Ellen Sturgis Hooper (1812-1848). Recent research has shown that Sturgis had a greater influence on Transcendentalist thought than previously acknowledged, particularly on Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose journals and poems provide evidence of his deep respect for her.[9][10]
Caroline Sturgis was a middle child of Captain William and Elizabeth Sturgis, who had six children, William Watson (1810-1827), Ellen (1812-1848), Anne (1813-1884), Caroline (1818-1888), Mary Louisa (1820-1870), and Susan (1825-1853).[11] William Watson, first-born son and his father’s beloved namesake, was killed at sixteen in a boating accident of the coast of Provincetown in 1827, when the boom of the boat suddenly gibed, hitting him in the head.[12] William and Elizabeth lived separately for a period after the accident, and although Elizabeth eventually returned to live with her husband, the family never recovered from this tragedy.[13]
Margaret Fuller formally introduced Sturgis to Emerson in the winter of 1837, during his course of lectures on Human Culture at Boston’s Masonic Temple.[10] Emerson knew her father from his time working as a minister in Boston and in previous visits to the Sturgis family, so he likely knew Caroline Sturgis when she was a child.[14] Emerson and his then fiancée Lydia Jackson were honored at a party at the Sturgis home on March 5, 1835, following Emerson’s lecture on Burke at Boston’s Masonic Temple, the sixth in his series on biography given for the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.[15][16][17] The friendship between Emerson and Sturgis grew following her sojourn with the Emersons at their house in Concord, Massachusetts, in June 1839, a visit that was followed by many others.[18] Their correspondence extended their face to face conversations on philosophy and literature, including on such works as Bettina von Arnim's Goethe's Correspondence with a Child.[19]
Sturgis began as Margaret Fuller’s student, and later became her primary confidante. Together they traveled to secluded destinations to write, draw, and think.[20] Sturgis was a catalyst for many of Fuller’s ideas about art, women, mysticism, and more. Both women loved one another in a romantic friendship similar to what Carroll Smith-Rosenberg describes in “The Female World of Love and Ritual.”[20][21] Sturgis joined Fuller for her extended stay at Fishkill Landing, New York from October through November 1844, during which time Fuller turned her 1843 Dial essay “The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men. Woman versus Women” into her important feminist work Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845).[22]
Sturgis spent the summer of 1845 boarding at The Old Manse while Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody lived there, and remained friends with the Hawthornes.[23] This friendship later became strained when the Hawthornes rented the little red house on the Sturgis’ property in the Berkshires.[24] She had purchased this former farm with her husband in 1849, eventually building a stick-style cottage on the land in 1865.[25] Sturgis named this estate “Tanglewood,” the name that Hawthorne eventually used for his short story collection Tanglewood Tales (1853), written while in residence in the little red house.[25]
In 1847, Sturgis married William Aspinwall Tappan, son of abolitionist Lewis Tappan and Susanna Aspinwall, and they had two daughters, Ellen Sturgis Tappan Dixey (b. 1849) and Mary Aspinwall Tappan (1851-1941).[26][27]
Caroline Sturgis had first been introduced to William Aspinwall Tappan by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who thought the pair would be a great match. Sturgis and her sister, Ellen Sturgis Hooper, were members of Emerson's Transcendentalist Circle, writing poetry for his publication, "The Dial." Perhaps Emerson had ulterior motives when he encouraged the courtship of the unlikely pair. Sturgis was a fiery red-head nicknamed "Diamond" by her father, while Tappan, a banker by trade, was described by Emerson as "a lonely, beautiful brooding youth" who learned to enjoy farming while away at boarding school.
In 1855, the Tappans and their children also departed the Berkshires, although only temporarily. They lived in Europe for the next four years, wintering in Paris and summering in Rome and the Alps. It was during this time that Caroline Tappan first "confided in her sister Anne Hooper about her difficulties with a withdrawn and distant husband," according to Gilder.
When the family returned stateside, Caroline and the children would settle in Boston and William would take up residence in the farm house. (He would reside there until it burnt to the ground in 1890.) In 1861, Caroline rented a house in Newport, R.I., for the winter. By 1864, it was clear William Tappan was settled in the Berkshires and his wife, at last, began building a home on their Lenox estate. She enlisted the aid of her cousin, John Hubbard Sturgis, a young architect to build her manse — a combination of stick and Gothic styles, with five gables and a large porch for entertaining.
Following Caroline's death in 1888, Tanglewood, as the house was then known, passed to her two surviving children, daughters, Mary Aspinwall Tappan and Ellen Tappen Dixey. Ellen and her husband, Richard Dixey, an accomplished pianist, renovated the interior in 1896 and added a music room large enough for two pianos. Ellen also added the formal "Gilded Age" gardens and a hedge maze.
Following Ellen's death, her share of the estate was passed on to her daughter, Rosamund Dixey Brooks Hepburn, who along with her Aunt Mary, then in her 80s, put the family estate up for sale in 1935. The asking price according to published advertisements was $45,000. When a buyer failed to emerge, the pair decided to donate the property to the Boston Symphony Orchestra.[28][29]
My published books:
