A short life of the author
Margaret Fuller was the most intellectually formidable woman in nineteenth-century America — a writer, thinker, and cultural critic of such extraordinary range and intensity that even Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was not easily intimidated, said of her: “She had a dangerous reputation for satire, in addition to her great scholarship.” She was the first editor of The Dial, the journal of American Transcendentalism. She was the first woman allowed to use the Harvard College library. She was the first female book reviewer for a major American newspaper. She was the author of the first major feminist treatise written in America. And she died at forty, within sight of the American shore, when the ship carrying her home from revolutionary Italy ran aground on a sandbar off Fire Island in a storm.
Cambridge and the “Conversations”
Sarah Margaret Fuller was born in 1810 in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts. Her father, Timothy Fuller, a lawyer and congressman, educated her with the rigour normally reserved for sons — she was reading Latin at six, Virgil at eight, and was fluent in French, German, and Italian before she was twenty. This education was a gift and a burden: it gave her intellectual powers that few of her contemporaries, male or female, could match, but it also left her socially awkward, physically exhausted (she suffered from chronic headaches attributed to her father’s relentless pedagogical regime), and painfully aware that the world offered no place for a woman of her abilities.
In the late 1830s and early 1840s, Fuller conducted her famous “Conversations” — a series of discussion groups for women held in Elizabeth Peabody’s Boston bookshop, in which she led discussions on mythology, art, ethics, and the condition of women. The Conversations were essentially a women’s seminar — the first of their kind in America — and they attracted the most intellectually ambitious women in Boston.
The Dial and Transcendentalism
Fuller edited The Dial (1840–1842), the quarterly journal of the Transcendentalist movement, which published work by Emerson, Thoreau, Theodore Parker, and Fuller herself. Her essay “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men, Woman versus Women” (1843), published in The Dial, was the seed of her most important work.
Woman in the Nineteenth Century
Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) was the first major feminist treatise published in America — a wide-ranging, intellectually ambitious argument for the full intellectual and spiritual equality of women that drew on mythology, literature, history, and philosophy to argue that the development of women’s capacities was essential not only to women’s happiness but to the progress of humanity as a whole. The book anticipated many of the arguments of later feminism — including the social construction of gender, the importance of economic independence, and the critique of marriage as an institution that subordinates women — and it established Fuller as the most important feminist thinker in America before Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Italy and Revolution
In 1846, Fuller sailed for Europe as the first female foreign correspondent for Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune. She traveled through England and France (where she met George Sand, Mazzini, and the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz), settled in Rome, fell in love with Giovanni Angelo Marchese Ossoli, a younger Italian nobleman, had a son by him, and became deeply involved in the Roman Revolution of 1848–1849. Her dispatches to the Tribune from revolutionary Rome were among the finest American journalism of the nineteenth century.
When the French army crushed the Republic in 1849, Fuller, Ossoli, and their infant son sailed for America. On 19 July 1850, within sight of Fire Island, their ship struck a sandbar in a hurricane and broke apart. All three perished. Thoreau went to Fire Island to search for Fuller’s body and her manuscripts; neither was recovered.
Critical Standing and the Problem of the Archive
Fuller’s reputation suffered for a century after her death, partly because of gender prejudice and partly because the Memoirs (1852) — compiled by Emerson, Channing, and Clarke — bowdlerised and sentimentalised her. Emerson, ambivalent about a woman whose intellect he acknowledged but whose intensity unsettled him, smoothed her into a more acceptable figure. Hawthorne, who had known her and disliked her, created the unflattering portrait of Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance (1852) — a passionate, brilliant woman who drowns herself. For generations, Fuller was remembered as a failure: the woman who “talked well” but left no great book, whose feminism was superseded, whose revolutionary enthusiasm was naive.
The revival began in the 1970s with the feminist recovery of her work. Scholars — particularly Bell Gale Chevigny, whose The Woman and the Myth (1976) was essential — restored the full scope of Fuller’s achievement. The lost manuscript of her history of the Roman Revolution has never been recovered, but her Tribune dispatches, republished and studied, reveal a writer of extraordinary courage and moral seriousness. Today Fuller is recognised not merely as a precursor to later feminism but as one of the central figures of American Transcendentalism — the movement’s most incisive critic and its most practically engaged member. Where Emerson theorised, Fuller acted; where Thoreau withdrew, Fuller engaged. The Transcendentalists produced two writers of enduring power: Thoreau and Fuller. Emerson, ironically, produced wisdom literature; Fuller and Thoreau produced art.
Collecting Fuller
Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (Little and Brown, 1844) is the early travel book. Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Greeley & McElrath, 1845) in first edition is the major feminist text and a significant American book. Papers on Literature and Art (Wiley and Putnam, 1846, 2 volumes) collects her criticism. Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Phillips, Sampson, 1852, 2 volumes), edited by Emerson, W.H. Channing, and James Freeman Clarke, is the standard nineteenth-century biography. All first editions are scarce.