Bright Circle: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism

In November 1839, a group of women in Boston formed a conversation society "to answer the great questions" of special importance to women. The lives and works of the five women who discussed these questions are at the center of Bright Circle, a group biography of thinkers and artists who played pathbreaking roles in the transcendentalist movement.



Transcendentalism remains the most important literary and philosophical movement to have originated in the United States. Most accounts of it, how...