Ellen Louisa Tucker Emerson (1811–1831)

Ellen Louisa Tucker, born in Boston, Massachusetts, met Ralph Waldo Emerson on Christmas Day 1827, when she was 16 years old. (Emerson was 24.) After exchanging many letters, they married 18 months later. She was well-read and wrote poetry and had suffered from tuberculosis for some time. The couple moved to Boston, where Emerson served as a minister at the Second Church of Boston. Ellen Louisa Tucker Emerson became more seriously ill during the winter of 1830-1831, and she died on February 8, 1831, at age 19. In 1962, Emerson's great-granddaughter from his second marriage, Edith Emerson Webster Gregg, published the couple's letters, along with some of Ellen’s poems, in a volume entitled One First Love: The Letters of Ellen Louisa Tucker to Ralph Waldo Emerson.