Sophia Peabody Hawthorne

By:
On:
In: 19th Century Women, Artists, Authors

Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, (1809-1871) was the devoted and artistically gifted wife of the American author, Nathaniel Hawthorne. All through her life, before her marriage to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sophia suffered from migraines brought on by mercury treatments as a child. Because of this, her mother and sisters believed her to be an invalid and treated her like one. They told her she’d never marry. She heard her mother say ‘Sophie will never leave me.’  She was constantly told ‘It’s a woman’s lot. It’s God’s will…’ but she refused to believe she was doomed to this fate. Sophia was lonely growing up—her sisters ignored her, her motherRead More →

By:
On:
In: 19th Century Women, Religion, Spiritualism

From Ghosts to Palestine Many 19th century women turned to occultism and spirituality as a way to escape the patriarchal bent of the major religions of the time. An example of this is Ada Goodrich Freer. Born in 1857, Ada Goodrich Freer was a British psychic, poet, and folklorist. Orphaned at a young age and fostered by an aunt who ran a girls’ boarding school, little is known of Freer’s early life other than that she was a very talented student. Much of what is available are stories she told about herself. For example, Freer claimed she had psychic premonitions and phantasmal experiences from childhood,Read More →