This is the first full-length biography of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, one of the three Peabody sisters of Salem, Massachusetts, and sister-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Horace Mann. It traces the intricate private life and extraordinary career of one of 19th-century America's most important Transcendental writers and educational reformers.

European liberal revolutions, Spiritualism, and, in her last years, the Paiute Indians. She was, as Theodore Parker described her, the Boswell of her age.