Emma Catherine Embury

Emma Catherine Embury gained great popularity as the author of more than four hundred stories, poems, and essays that emphasized moral lessons and the virtues of domesticity. Her daughter, Anne K. Sheldon, noted that Embury’s “impassioned earnestness, her scorn of injustice, [and] her quick sympathy with the oppressed, found expression in her poems, and [runs] like an electric thread throughout them.” Despite her literary career and support for female education, Embury believed women were best suited as wives and mothers and strongly opposed the contemporary women’s rights movement.

n the early 1830s, Henry Inman painted Embury and her husband, Daniel, a successful New York banker. Her portrait prompted Edgar Allan Poe to comment on Inman’s ability to capture Emma’s “intellectual and expressive” nature. Decades later, Jacob Hart Lazarus completed this copy of the origi-nal portrait for the Embury family. The direct gaze and confident pose bear out Poe’s assessment.