Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

1 July 2025: Today's return to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery moved me more than ever before and it's hard to explain why--at least quickly. 

But I found myself crying standing in front of the tiny marker that just says "Henry," Louisa May Alcott's stone and the American flag she earned working as a nurse in D.C., Hawthorne's family group, and, of course, Emerson's rock. 

The pens, pencils, and little notes left by others get me every time, but even more this time. They are little offerings of gratitude and connection. 

So much in our country seems broken right now, on the day that stupid "big beautiful bill" passes in the Senate. 

These writers, though? They point us to a better way. And they made me who I am--the kind of person who wants to help shape that better way for everyone else. 

There they all are, at eternal rest together, but their words live on. It's corny and cheesy, but it's beautiful and left me wiping my eyes on the Authors' Ridge today. 

Mr. Emerson...

19 May 2023: "Mr. Emerson I didn't fancy...” --Susan Warner in an 1846 (or 1847) letter about her visit to Boston (qtd. in Damon-Bach 26).

It just made me laugh. That's all. 

Work Cited

Damon-Bach, Lucinda L. “To Be a ‘Parlor Soldier’: Susan Warner’s Answer to Emerson’s ‘Self-Reliance.’” Separate Spheres No More: Gender Convergence in American Literature, 1830-1930, edited by Monika M. Elbert, U of Alabama P, 2000, pp. 29–49. 

Back to business

24 January 2014: Got to actually drive to work yesterday and drive home (although even on that short drive, there are still treacherous spots!). Got to teach my classes and see my students (Bradstreet and Emerson on the syllabi: pure happiness!). Got to see my friends and colleagues (some of whom I hadn't seen in a week). Got to meet with my capstone students (and talk about their exciting projects).

So, all in all, a normal day. And I am grateful for a return to normalcy and for a life where a normal day gives me such satisfaction.

Re-reading Emerson

I spent this morning re-reading Emerson's Nature, which I hadn't read since 2007 or so, the last time I taught it. Today, though, I remembered when I first read it--back in my senior year at Roanoke, back when I really fell in love with nineteenth-century American literature. I have this clear memory of walking back to my room one night after getting off work in the spring of 1999. I looked up at the stars and thought of this passage:

"To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds, will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are! If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile."

It was a scary, kind of uncertain time of my life--finishing college, getting ready to start the next part of my life, leaving my friends, and a place that had become home to me. Those words from Emerson brought me comfort and courage, as so many of these Transcendentalist texts did and still do. And now, nearly 15 years later, I am glad to have that memory.

Rebecca Harding Davis in Boston...

Since mid-December, I've had a Word document filled with notes from Rebecca Harding Davis's 1904 memoir Bits of Gossip sitting on the desktop of my computer. I recently wrote a (very short) introduction to Davis's "Life in the Iron Mills" which will appear in the new volume of the Anthology of Appalachian Writers. (Davis is the second heritage writer the anthology will include--last year's volume included Jesse Stuart's "Split Cherry Tree," for which I also wrote the introduction.) This evening, I am giving myself a little break from other work, and decided it's about time to write about those notes I've had saved since before Christmas.

The bits from Bits of Gossip were beyond the scope of my introduction, but I saved them anyway, especially the parts where Davis recounts her 1860s visits to Boston and her meetings with various American literary luminaries including Bronson Alcott (she was not a fan), his daughter Louisa (more about her below), Ralph Waldo Emerson (she was quite a fan, but felt he was hopelessly out of touch and felt his deep respect for Bronson Alcott was "almost painful to see"), and Nathaniel Hawthorne. These memories are especially interesting for someone studying 19th-century American literature, because they show us an "outsider's" perspective on the sometimes very insular world of the Boston literati.

I'll share just a few parts here. First, on Louisa May Alcott:

"During my first visit to Boston in 1862, I saw at an evening reception a tall, thin young woman standing alone in a corner. She was plainly dressed, and had that watchful, defiant air with which the woman whose youth is slipping away is apt to face the world which has offered no place to her. Presently she came up to me.
'These people may say pleasant things to you,' she said abruptly ; 'but not one of them would have gone to Concord and back to see you, as I did to-day. I went for this gown. It's the only decent one I have. I'm very poor;" and in the next breath she contrived to tell me that she had once taken a place as 'second girl.' 'My name,' she added, 'is Louisa Alcott.'

Now, although we had never met, Louisa Alcott had shown me great kindness in the winter just past, sacrificing a whole day to a tedious work which was to give me pleasure at a time when every hour counted largely to her in her desperate struggle to keep her family from want. The little act was so considerate and fine, that I am still grateful for it, now when I am an old woman, and Louisa Alcott has long been dead. It was as natural for her to do such things as for a pomegranate-tree to bear fruit.

Before I met her I had known many women and girls who were fighting with poverty and loneliness, wondering why God had sent them into a life where apparently there was no place for them, but never one so big and generous in soul as this one in her poor scant best gown, the 'claret-colored merino,' which she tells of with such triumph in her diary. Amid her grim surroundings, she had the gracious instincts of a queen. It was her delight to give, to feed living creatures, to make them happy in body and soul.

She would so welcome you on her home to a butterless baked potato and a glass of milk that you would never forget the delicious feast. Or, if she had no potato or milk to offer, she would take you through the woods to the river, and tell you old legends of colony times, and be so witty and kind in the doing of it that the day would stand out in your memory ever after, differing from all other days, brimful of pleasure and comfort.


With this summer, however, the darkest hour of her life passed. A few months after I saw her she went as a nurse into the war, and soon after wrote her 'Hospital Sketches.' Then she found her work and place in the world.

Years afterward she came to the city where I was living and I hurried to meet her. The lean, eager, defiant girl was gone, and instead, there came to greet me a large, portly, middle-aged woman, richly dressed. Everything about her, from her shrewd, calm eyes to the rustle of her satin gown told me of assured success.

Yet I am sure fame and success counted for nothing with her except for the material aid which they enabled her to give to a few men and women whom she loved. She would have ground her bones to make their bread. Louisa Alcott wrote books which were true and fine, but she never imagined a life as noble as her own. "

It seems to me here that Davis is especially insightful and sensitive to so many important factors: what drove Alcott in her work, what it was like for women like Louisa who really did wonder what their place in the world was, how she very nearly did write herself to death to support her family. Yes, it is a bit sentimental, especially towards the end, but I find the whole sketch quite moving (especially her description of "that watchful, defiant air with which the woman whose youth is slipping away is apt to face the world which has offered no place to her.")

Davis's recollections of Hawthorne reveal her deep admiration for him and his work, not surprising since he was a life-long influence on her own work. She writes of her final meeting with him, a few months before his death. They walked around Concord, and sat down on the grass in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery:

"...In a few months he was lying under the deep grass, at rest, near the very spot where he sat and laughed, looking up at us. I left Concord that evening and never saw him again. He said good-by, hesitated shyly, and then, holding out his hand, said:-- 'I am sorry you are going away. It seems as if we had known you always.' The words were nothing. I suppose he forgot them and me as he turned into the house. And yet, because perhaps of the child in the cherry-tree, and the touch which the magician laid upon her, I have never forgotten them. They seemed to take me, too, for one moment, into his enchanted country. Of the many pleasant things which have come into my life, this was one of the pleasantest and best."

That reads a bit like a fan-girl's dream come true, right? To have one of your favorite writers--someone who has influenced you so much--share such kind words with you? Good stuff. As a side-note, I like this little memory of late-in-his-life-Hawthorne because so much of what I came across while writing my Marble Faun paper indicated how unhappy and unpleasant he was late in life. It's nice to see that there might have been some exceptions to that general mood of dissatisfaction.

You can read more of Bits of Gossip here (the whole thing's on Google Books!) or just look at the "Boston in the 1860s" section here.

The highs and lows of teaching...

The low: This morning, in my 9:35 ENGL 102 class, I aked a simple question: "How many of you remembered to bring two copies of the workshop sheet? You know, the workshop sheet? The one I emailed you as an attachment, along with specific instructions that said you needed to bring two copies today? The one I also posted on Sakai and on the class web page? The one it says you to bring two copies of on your syllabus?"

How many of my dear angels remembered? Of the nineteen who were there this morning, a grand total of eight had them. Four didn't even have drafts of their papers.

I was so mad. (And that's an understatement.) "Completely unacceptable!" I barked at them. I don't yell at my students a lot--I don't often have the need to. But when I do, they notice. And I did more than just yell--they'll be losing major points on their essays.

If I could have, I would have thrown the offenders out of the window one at a time. As it is, I am already dreading this weekend, as I make my way through their essays, many of which are sure to be crap.

The high: After I met with my afternoon section of ENGL 102, I was in a better mood. They all had their papers and only (!) five of them had forgotten the sheets. (Can you believe five out of twenty-five forgetting something--a full 20%--is a number that makes me feel better?)

Then, on my way back down to my office, I ran into one of my favorite students. She's in my ENGL 312 class this semester and had missed class the day before. "I was so upset about missing it!" she explained. "I love Nature!" (the Emerson text we discussed that day). "I was wickedly enjoying Emerson all weekend! Seriously--I am going to stop by your office just to talk about how awesome it is."

"Wickedly enjoying Emerson!" I love that.

Emerson Place

As an English teacher, I find myself wondering every once in a while what difference my work makes in the world. These are only temporary doubts, of course--I am a firm believer in the value of what I do, but it's nice to see results, no matter how unexpected. Today I got an email from one of my former Richmond students. I'll paste most of it below, although I've changed his name and taken out some of the cheesier parts:

"Dr. Hanrahan,

Hello! It's John Smith, one of your students who wishes you were still at Richmond. I just thought you might find it amusing that I'm interning for an advertising and marketing agency in Washington, DC, and we are doing all the brochures and signage for a community in Lebanon, NH called Emerson Place. Inspired, I proposed that the floorplans be named after his contemporaries and those who he influenced, which was approved. So now there are some two-bedroom, one and a half bath apartments in Lebanon called the Alcott, the Poe, the Melville, and the Thoreau.

Also, the art director incorporated a bit of Emerson into the brochures; the quote(s) "Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem to be confidences or sides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profound thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart" are in an Emerson-looking font around the borders of each page.

I hope everything is going well for you where you have landed. If you have any additional reading recommendations in the vein of anything you had us read in the class (esp. American Gothic like Lippard) please do let me know. Keep up the good work and keep inspiring people!"

Okay, so I left in some of the cheese. Sue me. (This is the spot where my always hilarious mother would jump in and say, "What, did you give him an 'A'?" She says stuff like that any time I tell her anything nice my students say about me. It's so very funny.)

Seriously, though, how strange (and amusing) to think that someday the upwardly-mobile in New Hampshire will be living in rooms named after great nineteenth-century American writers--all because of a class I taught one semester at the University of Richmond. Not exactly my ideal idea of changing the world, but I'll take what I can get. Too bad they didn't take it a step further and name one "The Fanny Fern." I guess that's asking too much. And no, I have no idea what that (wonderful) quotation from Emerson has to do with apartment layouts. I suppose the art director thought it sounded nice and intelligent. Emerson is so very quotable, but lots of times the contexts seem strange.