Sophia Peabody and her Sisters, lecture four in the Seven Lectures at Seven Gables lecture series

Megan Marshall will be presenting her lecture entitled Sophia Peabody and her Sisters at The House of the Seven Gables on July 18, 2012 at 7:00 p.m. Marshall is the winner of the Francis Parkman Prize and a Pulitzer finalist for her book, The Peabody Sisters, Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism.

This lecture marks lecture 4 in The House of the Seven Gables' lecture series Seven Lectures at Seven Gables: Strong Women of the Gables. Marshall will speak on the formative years of Salem's best known sisterhood, whose youngest member, Sophia Peabody, grew up to marry native son Nathaniel Hawthorne. Marshall will also speak about the relationships among the sisters and their suitors, who also included the politician and educator Horace Mann. The Peabody and Hawthorne families together made Salem one of the most significant sites, along with Boston and Concord, of America's nineteenth-century renaissance in arts and letters.

Megan Marshall has published numerous essays and reviews in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Slate Online, The New York Times Book Review, The London Review of Books, The New Republic, The Boston Review, and elsewhere. She is also the recipient of many fellowships and serves on the Board of Directors of the Copyright Clearance Center, the Executive Board of the Society of American Historians, and the Advisory Board of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society.

Marshall is completing a second biography, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2013.  For the occasion of Margaret Fuller's bicentennial in May, 2010, Marshall curated an exhibition of rare books, manuscripts, and artwork at the Massachusetts Historical Society titled "A More Interior Revolution": Elizabeth Peabody, Margaret Fuller, and the Women of the American Renaissance.

A graduate of Harvard/Radcliffe College, where she received the Harvard Monthly Award for the most promising student writer and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, Marshall studied writing with poets Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Fitzgerald.  In 2007 she was awarded the Radcliffe Alumnae Recognition Award for a graduate of the college who “by the quality of her life and spirit exemplifies what the liberal arts education hopes to achieve.”   That same year she joined the faculty of the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College where she currently teaches narrative nonfiction writing and the art of archival research in the MFA program.  She was voted Outstanding Teacher of the Year by the Graduate Student Association in 2012.

For information, please contact: (978) 744-0991, ext. 105, or email:  anuncio@7gables.org. Admission to the lecture:  $10 Members, $15 Non-Members. To purchase tickets, please contact (978) 744-0991, ext. 104.