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By Root 578 0

- home to Emerson, Thoreau, the Alcotts and the less blithe Hawthorne - during the town’s Transcendentalist heyday. Grandma Wilder had been friendliest with the Thoreau family and remained on visiting terms with Thoreau’s aunts, placid Aunt Jane with a close cap over her white hair and sharp Aunt Maria, whose wide cap was festooned with purple ribbons over a ‘front’ of dangling curls. The sisters liked to recall how Thoreau had made the most of robust home meals during his experiment in stripping existence to its essence at Walden Pond. Thoreau himself had invited Eben Loomis to join his expedition to the Maine Woods, and he’d held baby Mabel in his arms before handing her over with a relieved groan. Mabel could recall the velvety biscuit the Thoreau sisters put in her hand when the Loomis family visited them in Boston’s Bowdoin Square.

The Concord connections fed reminiscent stories on the part of Mary Loomis, who was not always truthful. She was apt to embroider the past: Grandma Wilder, it should be known, had been the belle of society before she married a clergyman, and the line of Mr Loomis could be traced ‘straight back . . . to Richard Coeur de Lion’. No mention of the unmarked progenitor, one Joseph Loomis, who arrived in Boston in 1638. It was Mrs Loomis rather than her husband who contrived an appearance of gentility. Their only child, Mabel, was beautifully dressed, for Mrs Loomis was skilled with her needle, and so winning was this child that her parents could deny her nothing. They struggled to save and occupied meagre rooms so that Mabel might have three winters at Miss Lipscomb’s school in Georgetown, where girls were modelled as sprightly, mannered Southern ladies while they took in a curriculum of astronomy, chemistry and geometry.

The Loomises then scrimped to send their daughter to the Boston Conservatory of Music. Grandma Wilder, who accompanied Mabel as chaperone, introduced her to another Concord figure, Louisa May Alcott. Mabel was astonished by Alcott’s humorous admission that she had never had a lover. Pathetic, Mabel thought; from the age of fifteen she’d found it easy enough to attract admirers, with her soft, slightly projecting lower lip and arched upper lip so that her mouth lay appealingly open. Seven years after the publication of Little Women, Mabel would have been alert to Alcott’s fame but the novel was not for her. She had only contempt for domestic women and no intention of being ‘little’ or unnoticed; not for her the hidden life of goodness, appealing to women of the preceding generation who shared George Eliot’s faith that half the good in the world is done by those who lie in unvisited tombs. Henry James’s cousin Minny Temple, writing her selfless letters to James in 1869-70, was another devotee of George Eliot. Neither Minny Temple (in her twenties) nor Emily Dickinson (in her forties) was ‘little’ of course - James recognised in Minny a ‘grande nature’, great enough to be his model for an American girl who will ‘affront her destiny’, while Dickinson saw herself as ‘Queen’ - yet neither expected to advance onto the platform of public action in the manner of New Women of the next generation.

In 1874 Mabel, at eighteen, was taking shape on the cusp of a new era when women began to emerge from domestic seclusion into politics or the workplace or, in her case, performance. Propriety dictated that it had to be a ladylike performance. The theatre, her natural arena, would not have entered her mind. To play or sing in drawing rooms, excelling beyond the range of an ordinary Miss, was her first ambition.

At the Conservatory, Mabel lamented when her parents could not pay for courses in harmony and theory required for a diploma. Later she wrote a story about a singing girl whose parents can’t afford the ‘extras’ girls of less talent enjoy but whose private diligence wins out. Her voice grows ‘stronger and clearer, filling every corner . . . with bird-like music’. Conscious of ‘repressed power’, Mabel’s heroine longs for ‘an opportunity to exercise it’. When the opportunity comes, ‘the audience