Christine Leigh Heyrman - Doomed Romance: Broken Hearts, Lost Souls, and Sexual Tumult in Nineteenth-Century America

Martha Parker, a teacher

Thomas Tenney, a teacher training for the ministry

Elnathan Gridley, a minister preparing for the mission field

Ann Parker Bird, the eldest sister, a teacher and, with her husband, Isaac Bird, a member of the Palestine mission in Ottoman Syria

Emily Parker Kimball, the second-eldest sister, a teacher and the wife of James Kimball, a minister in Vermont and friend of Elnathan Gridley

William Parker, their younger brother, a student at Dartmouth College

Martha Tenney Parker Mills, the family matriarch, widow of Captain William Parker, remarried to Lieutenant Thomas Mills

Abigail Hasseltine, the preceptress of Bradford Academy

William Gould and Charlotte Gage Gould, Marthas employers at a school in Fairhaven, Massachusetts

Walter Harris, the minister in Dunbarton, New Hampshire

Sarah Tenney, Thomass sister and fellow teacher at Moors Charity School in Hanover, New Hampshire

Elisha Jenney, a student at Dartmouth College and the son of a Fairhaven, Massachusetts, merchant

Silas Aiken, a tutor at Dartmouth College and the son of a New Hampshire farmer

Bennet Tyler, the president of Dartmouth College

Jeremiah Evarts, a lawyer who headed the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions

Rufus Anderson, Evartss subordinate and later his successor

Leonard Woods, a professor at Andover Theological Seminary and mentor to Elnathan Gridley

Catharine Beecher, an educator and author, the eldest daughter of Lyman Beecher, an evangelical leader in the early republic

Charles Finney, a famed evangelical revivalist who allowed women to take active roles at his worship services

Abigail Davis Goodell and William Goodell

Pliny Fisk and Levi Parsons

Eli Smith

Daniel Temple

Years spent in the company of high-minded people have given me a taste for low gossip, and thats how this book began. Research for another project had me reading the letters of early-nineteenth-century missionaries scattered throughout the Ottoman Empire, a correspondence among pious Yankees set on saving the world. But into those earnest pages occasionally strayed bits of news about a romantic triangle back in New England. At its apex was a gifted young schoolteacher, Martha Parker; at its two other points were Thomas Tenney, an intense striver who kept school while studying for the ministry, and Elnathan Gridley, a clergyman and accomplished charmer who aspired to become a missionary. Both men hoped to marry her, and she, at different times, accepted proposals from each. My snooping turned up just enough to tantalize, but the possibility of finding out more about this story of love and loss, romance and rivalry in the early nineteenth century seemed slim to none.

Thats what makes two-hundred-year-old tales of heartbreak so intriguing: private lives were much more private then. For centuries, stoicism served as the default mode for nearly everyone in the Western world, ordinary people especially. The harder life was, the more crucial to hold emotion in check: sometimes survival itself demanded restraint, even hiding the hearts desire. By the 1820s, when her suitors vied to win Martha Parker, some women and men had begun to give freer voice to their feelings, but most letters and diaries still withheld more than they revealed. The notable exception to that reticence was religion, a subject about which some could not divulge enough. By contrast, the intimate matters of flirtation, courtship, engagement, and above all sex received terse and even cryptic coverage.

That made missionaries gossip stick in my mind. There it stayed until several years later when I came across a reference to an archival collection titled Papers Relating to the Case of Martha T. Parker and Elnathan Gridley, 18251828. There they were again, that pretty pair of twentysomethings in pursuit of their dreams until, thanks to Thomas Tenney and his allies, the stars crossed. Most likely, I guessed, these so-called papers would amount to no more than a couple of lettersyet more testimony to the eras entrenched reserve. That expectation lasted until the moment that an archivist approached my table at the library and set down a very large box.

Within lay hundreds of loose pages, along with a bound volume containing a transcription of the whole lot in a neat clerks hand. There were letters, firsthand accounts of events, and a long narrative summary, all setting forth the thoughts, feelings, and actions of Martha Parker, the men who courted her, and the wide circle of their friends and relatives. Here was a window onto the past that rarely opened, an intimate view of the inner lives of young Americans who were, like most of their white contemporaries in the North, rural in their origins, middling in their means, and deeply religious. The secrets kept close by most of their contemporaries spilled out of these pages, and the women and men making those disclosurestheir personalities and the plots of their livesstaked a claim on my imagination. Perhaps most intriguing was the mix of desire and fear that this young woman aroused in many of her male admirers, a potent combination which, then as now, could produce explosive consequences. For anyone curious about the lost emotional worlds of the past, this box was missing only a ribbon and a bow.