Ellen Sturgis Hooper (1812–1848)

Ellen Sturgis Hooper was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the eldest daughter of William Sturgis, a wealthy merchant, and his wife Elizabeth Marston Davis. Her younger sister Caroline Sturgis Tappan also became a poet. Ellen's poetry was regularly published in The Dial, the Transcendentalist periodical. Her poems also appeared in Elizabeth Palmer Peabody's short-lived journal Aesthetic Papers in 1849. In 1837, she married Robert William Hooper, a physician, with whom she had three children. Among her circle were William Ellery Channing, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. She died in 1848 at age 36, possibly of tuberculosis. Fuller wrote of her, "I have seen in Europe no woman more gifted by nature than she." Her daughter Marian "Clover" Hooper married Henry Adams and became a famous photographer, society hostess, and letter writer.