Lowe,Margaret 11/15/15 BRIDGEWATER Bridgewater State University STATE UNIVERSITY Virtual Commons - Bridgewater State University History Faculty Publications History Department 2013 'How Very Wrong They Are, How Little They Know:' Diary-keeping, Private Anguish, Public Bodies, and Modern Female Subjectivity Margaret A. Lowe Bridgewater State University, mlowe@bridgew.edu Virtual Commons Citation Lowe, Margaret A. (2013). 'How Very Wrong They Are, How Little They Know:' Diary-keeping, Private Anguish, Public Bodies, and Modern Female Subjectivity. In History Faculty Publications. Paper 39. Available at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/history_fac/39 This item is available as part of Virtual Commons, the open-access institutional repository of Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts. "How Very Wrong They Are, How Little They Know": Diary-keeping, Private Anguish, Public Bodies, and Modern Female Subjectivity Margaret Lowe A S SHE DID MOST JANUARYS, in 1892, Marian Peabody (née Law- rence), a seventeen-year-old, upper-class Bostonian, turned to her diary to set New Year's resolutions, one of which was to improve her diary-keeping: "I begin this diary with the usual resolutions to be neat, truthful and explicit." Having begun her diary at age twelve, Peabody kept true to her word-for a time. She crafted a mostly "neat," strikingly "truthful," and quite "explicit" diary for another twelve years. Then, despite her best intentions, Peabody's diary went silent. Upon her marriage to Harold Peabody in May 1906, Pea- body's life, and her diary along with it, fell into deep disarray; rather than being neatly ordered, life turned messy and unpredictable. As she later reflected, life had taken such a serious turn that, where once a constant companion, her diary now "seemed like my 'dolls' & my pinafores-a thing of the past. ,,2 Peabody's life, or more pre- cisely, her sense of herself within that life, had splintered. Just two months after her marriage, baffled and disoriented, Peabody di- Margaret Lowe, ""How Very Wrong They Are, How Little They Know': Diary-keeping, Private Anguish, Public Bodies, and Modern Female Sub- jectivity," Journal of Historical Biography 13 (Spring 2013): 58-92, www.ufv.ca/jhb. © Journal of Historical Biography 2013. This work is li- censed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License 11/15/2015 XFINITY Connect XFINITY Connect eppster2@comcast.net + Font Size = Re: Marian & Harold Peabody From : Ronald Epp Sun, Nov 15, 2015 01:47 PM Subject : Re: Marian & Harold Peabody To : Margaret Lowe Dear Maggie, As you can see (below), I too have been lapse in responding to your email-- of eight years ago! I've chanced upon your "How very wrong they are.." publication several months ago and read it this morning. What prompted my interest was a talk given by Marian's father, the Reverend William Lawrence, at the celebration of 5, 000 acres of landscape achieving achieving national monument status in 1916. Next year's centennial of the beginnings of Acadia National Park may well include an August dramatic presentation of the addresses that Lawrence and others delivered in celebration of conserving landscape in Bar Harbor and other villages on Mount Desert Island. My own contribution will be the April publication of Creating Acadia National Park: The Biography of George B. Dorr which like your study of Marian Peabody is heavily dependent on the Massachusetts Historical Society collections. Your essay helped me to better appreciate Marian's enthusiasm for Bar Harbor as well as the vexing complexities of the early years of her marriage to Harold. I am left wondering about whether you found in the MHS Lawrence diaries additional explanations for her unbridled enthusiasm for Bar Harbor that was perhaps not revealed--or loss to fading memory--so many years later when she wrote To be Young Was Very Heaven. Regarding my remark about Harold as being unkind, that is based on events on Mount Desert in the early 1920's when he took a stand against expansion of the park and Rockefeller's carriage road system. Lastly, if you have explored Marian's life in other talks and publications, I'd be delighted to know so that I can pursue this line of inquiry further. All the Best, Ronald H. Epp, Ph.D. 532 Sassafras Dr. Lebanon, PA 17042 717-272-0801 From: "Margaret Lowe" To: "ELIZABETH and RONALD EPP" Sent: Friday, April 20, 2007 4:05:40 PM Subject: RE: Marian & Harold Peabody Dear Dr. Epp, Please forgive my tardy reply to your wonderful note. Thank you for contacting me. The MLP diary is at the Massachusetts Historical Society. I would love to talk with you further about your project. It sounds fascinating an will fill a critical lack in the literature. I actually know very little about Harold. I know him only through Marian's diary and am not aware of any personal papers. How did you come to understand his relationship to her family and so forth https://web.mail.comcast.net/zimbra/h/printmessage?id=336384&tz=America/New_York&xim= 1/3 11/15/2015 XFINITY Connect as "unkind"? He does not come off so well in the diary either but I'm sure there's more to the story. Perhaps we could make a time to speak over the phone or in person. Again, please accept my apology for not responding sooner. It's not for lack of interest just the usual business. Best, Maggie Lowe Associate Professor Director, Teaching American History Grant Department of History Tillinghast Hall Bridgewater State College Bridgewater, MA 02325 508-531-2406 (o) 508-531-6167 (f) mlowe@bridgew.edu From: ELIZABETH and RONALD EPP [mailto:eppster2@verizon.net] Sent: Saturday, March 24, 2007 10:01 AM To: Lowe, Margaret Subject: Marian & Harold Peabody Dear Dr. Lowe: I recently became aware of your involvement in the life of Marian Lawrence Peabody through your CART Colloquium presentation posted on the Internet. At that time, I was unaware of the existence of her diary though I was was very fond of her To Be Young Was Very Heaven. Following six years of archival research, I am presently writing a biography of a dear friend of Rev. Lawrence, George Bucknam Dorr (1853-1944), a fellow Harvard graduate and founder of Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island, ME. One of the strongest opponents of Dorr's collaborative work with John D. Rockefeller Jr. in extending road development throughout the new Park was Harold Peabody. This morning I was re-reading his 1924 testimony before a Congressional Committee regarding future road expansion and reflecting anew about the nature of his relationship with his wife, her family, and their Mount Desert Island friends in the two decades preceding his testimony, which was at time most unkind to say the least. I do not believe that the holdings record at Houghton and the Massachusetts Historical Society refer to a diary and so I am most curious aboiut the provenance, scope, and content for what you have in hand as it may relate to my interests. The Peabody's are a remarkable family. My interests have centered on Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and her role in the American Transcendentalist Movement due to my labors in Special Collections at the nearby Concord Free Public Library (Mass.) where her library is now preserved. Biographically, I retired last year as Director of Shapiro Library at Southern New https://web.mail.comcast.net/zimbra/h/printmessage?id=336384&tz=America/New_York&xim=1 2/3 11/15/2015 XFINITY Connect Hampshire University and spent more than two decades as a Professor of Philosophy at the Naval Academy, University of Memphis, and University of Hartford before a four year stint as managing editor of a scholarly journal. I've published articles and given many talks on Dorr's largely unexamined contributions to the early history of American conservationist thinking, especially as it relates to his Boston heritage and the family of President Charles W. Eliot. I'd appreciate hearing from you and learning more about inquiries into Mrs. Peabody's diary, especially as it relates to their experiences on Mount Desert Island. With best wishes, Ronald H. Epp, Ph.D. Ron Epp 47 Pond View Drive Merrimack, NH 03054 (603) 424-6149 eppster2@verizon.net https://web.mail.comcast.net/zimbra/h/printmessage?id=336384&tz=America/New_York&xim= 3/3