Biography
Ellen Sturgis was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of William F. Sturgis and Elizabeth M. Davis. Her father was a wealthy Boston merchant.
Her poetry was regularly commissioned by Ralph Waldo Emerson and published in The Dial. Her poems also appeared in Elizabeth Peabody's Æsthetic Papers (1849), and the final stanzas of one of her poems, The Wood-Fire, appear in Henry David Thoreau's novel, Walden (1854).
She married Robert W. Hooper, and the couple had three children, one of whom, Marian "Clover" Hooper, married Henry Adams and became a celebrated Washington, D.C., hostess and photographer.
Ellen Sturgis Hooper's early death in Boston, at age 36, is said to have "enshrined her in the memories of her associates as a Transcendental angel."
Read more about this topic: Ellen Sturgis Hooper
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“A biography is like a handshake down the years, that can become an arm-wrestle.”
—Richard Holmes (b. 1945)
“Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.”
—James Boswell (1740–95)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)