Sketch of Anne Jean

19 February 2007        95:  SUMMARY        Syd Nathans     The sheriff of Northampton had no chance, not against Judge Lyman’s wife.  When Anne Jean Lyman picked a protégé, it was settled.  And in the spring of 1844, she picked Sheriff Wright’s sixteen-year old son.  Chauncey Wright was not to stay in Northampton to teach children half his age, nor was he perhaps at some future time to go to Amherst, close to home.  He must go to Harvard—that fall.   She would take care of it, and did.  She went to Cambridge, saw Harvard’s president Quincy, and made an incontrovertible case for Chauncey, as only she could. Determination ran in her bloodline.  Forbear Anne Hutchinson in 1640 had created her own circle of worship in Puritan Massachusetts, and rather than submit to leaders who condemned her claim to hear and follow the voice of God, chose exile in the dissenters’ haven of Rhode Island.  Boston grandfather James Murray in 1775 had chosen loyalty to the crown—and exile to Britain—over the madness of rebellion, sacrificing all but honor.  In 1820, her family aghast, the seventeen-year old Anne Jean Robbins of Milton met and married Northampton Judge Joseph Lyman, a widower almost three times her age.  She finished the rearing of his four children, bore five of her own, rose daily to dust the house before waking her two servant-women, darned or mended all manner of garb with what her children dubbed a “goblin tapestry,” read aloud or urged others to read aloud from morning to night, and kept up with the village from her rocker at the door, hailing all in sight to share their news or listen to a passage she had just come upon.  What was worthy must be shared, and the worthiest youth of Northampton must go to Harvard, even if the sheriff and other villagers wondered what they’d done to deserve such a Samaritan.   Anne Jean Lyman’s world of twenty-five years at the center of life and family in Northampton began to vanish in the late 1840s.   Her sons left, her husband died, her Northampton son-in-law, ready to be the staff and stay of her widow’s years, drowned.  Her youngest daughters married and moved away.   Alone and despondent in an empty house, she had no idea that worse was yet to come.  Mind and memory grew erratic; she fainted one moment, woke lucid the next.  Anxious children moved her to a cottage in Cambridge to be near her three sisters and employed a devoted companion to care for her.  Through the 1850s she battled to stay true to her wits and independence.  Help came from the Northampton sheriff’s son, now a philosopher and young instructor in mathematics at Harvard.  Chauncey Wright visited daily, read or ruminated for hours.  No matter that his brilliance was largely incomprehensible to her; the Samaritan’s protégé was there to see her through.   She died in Boston’s McLean Asylum in 1867 but can be found, relish intact, in her daughter’s Recollections of My Mother.  Read aloud.

 

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