Two Wives & a Spinster

THE PEABODY SISTERS OF SALEM (372 pp.)--Louise Hall Tharp--Little, Brown ($4).

Poor "Lizzie" Peabody. "Busybody" might have been a better name. She was such a congenital, selfless do-gooder, almost too perfect a distaff product of New England's 19th Century intellectual flowering. As a child of four in Salem, Mass., she was already envious of Neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne's sister Ebe, who was six and reading Shakespeare. Twenty-nine years later (1837) when future brother-in-law Nathaniel published his Twice-Told Tales, Liz sang his praises so busily that Hawthorne got tired of her. Once during the Civil War when Liz decided that Abraham Lincoln was running the war badly, she rushed off to Washington to tell him so. Satisfied that Mr. Lincoln was really the man for the job, she directed her energies into good works for distressed Negro children. At 66, Spinster Liz started the nation's first public kindergarten. She was past 80 when she went to Washington to lobby for mistreated Indians, just short of 90 when she died, her mind busy with women's emancipation and machinery for world peace.

Resolute Lizzie dominates The Peabody Sisters of Salem, a Book-of-the-Month Club selection for January, just as she tried to dominate her friends and family. Housewife-Author Louise Hall Tharp, whose previous books, have been juveniles, has carefully apportioned each Peabody girl her due in a three-figure biography that shuttles from sister to sister and becomes in the end a kind of trellis for most of the blooms of the Yankee flowering. Emerson, Alcott, Channing, Margaret Fuller, Thoreau and most of the others pop up in this book with the naturalness of neighbors dropping in to borrow a copy of the Boston Transcript. Mrs. Tharp's greatest charm is "that she loves and respects her gallery of famous individualists but is never awed by them. What she has to say about them is closer to kitchen common sense than to scholarly penetration; in this portrait they are seen with their transcendentalism down.

Passes at Horace. The Peabody girls were very poor and very genteel. Mother Peabody held her head high because her family had once been rich, though now she had to roll back the parlor rug and teach the neighbors' children when she wasn't brought to bed with her own (she also bore three sons and another daughter who died in infancy). Father Nathaniel was a dentist, a kindly potterer and whittler who never learned how to stand up to his energetic womenfolk. By any standards of the day, his daughters made their marks.

Beautiful Sophia was the youngest, reared by her mother as a fragile invalid only to shed her ailment when handsome Nathaniel Hawthorne made her his wife. The second sister, Mary, was the quiet one who married famed Educator Horace Mann--but only after sister Liz had made maidenly passes at Horace which included combing his hair. Liz never did get the men she coveted at various times of her long life, though one suitor seems to have committed suicide when Liz decided that he "was not sound-minded nor well-principled."

Sincere Encyclopedia. Working largely from diaries and letters, Author Tharp fills the married lives of Sophia Hawthorne and Mary Mann with the kind of domestic detail that might warm the hearts of any sewing circle. But whenever she leaves them to catch up with Lizzie's latest doings, The Peabody Sisters begins to hum with good works and intellectual vibrations. Liz was a prodigious worker who was seldom paid for her effort. For a time, she was William Ellery Channing's secretary, but the great preacher apparently never thought to pay her except in inspiration. The Dial, which she published and Emerson edited, was a financial flop. Her Boston bookstore was for years the meeting place of the literary greats of the day, but book sales were most discouraging.

But to Liz, with her indomitable drive and conscience, each new project seemed the one that would justify all past failures. No one could ever accuse her of being a fuddyduddy. In her old age she approved of the new electric streetcars and telephones and raised her firm Peabody voice for women's suffrage. Author Tharp's judgment seems fair enough: "A walking encyclopedia of worthy causes, and . . . something of a pest. . . But no one could accuse her of insincerity."

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