Letters of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, American Renaissance woman /

Peabody (1804-94) was an extraordinary character--but a fairly drab writer, and so this slice of her vast correspondence (about 10 percent of more than 1,500 surviving letters) informs but does not entertain. Ronda (American Studies, Skidmore) opens with a long introduction that slights Peabody's personal life and concentrates on the grand intellectual movements of her day (Unitarianism, Romanticism, organicism), to which she made only a modest contribution. But Ronda's editing is careful and detailed, and these letters deserve to be in print. They chronicle,among other things, Peabody's rapturous admiration for William Ellery Channing, her failed romance with Horace Mann (who married her sister Mary), her tireless work as an educator (she championed Froebel's new idea of the kindergarten), her publishing career (the Dial, anti-slavery pamphlets), her passion for spiritualism, her commitment to all sorts of causes, from classical languages to the Paiute Indians. This astonishingly vigorous spinster, gently parodied as Miss Birdseye in The Bostonians, knew many of the leading figures of her century from Emerson to Hawthorne (whom she ""discovered"") to Lincoln (with whom she had a lively interview, just before his assassination). Peabody's thinking was seldom bold or original (she piously hoped George Eliot had never slept with G. H. Lewes), but her spiritual vitality was unmatched. ""I am quite blind,"" she wrote at 83, ""--deaf--and dumb--yet--though nearly so from dim eyes, dull ears, and voice-repressing bronchial organs. But. . . the eyes of the spirit and its ears open all the more as the sensuous organs close."" Despite her preachy, prosaic tone (and her tiresome stream of dashes), a valuable collection. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.