So says Dr. Cecile de Rocher, Assistant Professor of English, whose book Elizabeth Manning Hawthorne: A Life in Letters has recently been published by the University of Alabama Press.

“She wrote letters and poems, and she would have liked to have written more,” says de Rocher, explaining that as an avid reader, “Elizabeth wanted to write reviews for magazines. She and her younger brother both loved to read and write as young people, but life took them down different paths.”

Those different paths, resulting from the gender restrictions of the day, led Elizabeth to lead a relatively quiet life in Beverly, Massachusetts, where she lived in a farm house and spent her days reading, writing, traveling and taking long nature walks. Her brother Nathaniel lived in Concord and wrote and published such literary masterpieces as The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables.

While Elizabeth’s writings may not have had the readership or scope of her younger brother’s, they do have a great deal of historical value, de Rocher says, noting that that through her letters, it is possible to understand the attitudes that people had toward such events as the Civil War.

“Elizabeth’s writings reveal the larger worlds of politics, war, the literary landscape, class, family life, and the freedoms and constraints of a woman’s role during that period,” says de Rocher, who became interested in her letters when she was working on her doctorate in English at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

“I wanted to find out about women writers of the period, and it was important to me not to rehash what had already been done,” she recalls. “I was surprised that there was not much written about Elizabeth, so I began to search library collections for her letters and correspondences.”

Elizabeth’s letters span the greater part of the 19th century, beginning in 1814, and contain keen insights on historical events beginning with the War of 1812 through the Franco-Prussian War. She continued writing until shortly before she died at age 80, in 1883.”

Searching through seven library collections of her letters housed at such places as Bowdoin College, the Peabody-Essex Museum, and the Boston Public Library, de Rocher initially cataloged nearly 250 letters to include in her dissertation, but edited them down to a more manageable 118 for publication.

“Elizabeth didn’t intend for her letters to be circulated,” she says. “In fact, she often asked the recipients to burn the letters she sent to them. People often kept or copied letters, but Elizabeth was critical of her own letters.”

Remembered for her wit, her beauty, and her love of nature, Elizabeth Hawthorne was also known to be “awfully harsh and frank in her writings at times,” de Rocher says.

“But it’s refreshing to see the world of the nineteenth century through her eyes. She was immersed in the literary world and knew the important writers of her time. We can all benefit from what this smart, literate woman had to say about the events of her day.”