I talk about Fuller, and nobody has ever heard of her. I find that quite shocking. Of course it took me to my 53rd year.
Margaret Fuller (Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli) (1810 – 1850) was a Concord Transcendentalist with Thoreau, Emmerson, Hawthorne and father Alcott and Louisa May Alcott. She wrote a travel book when she traveled around the Great Lakes, and wrote a book on women. She was an editor of a New York newspaper, and the Transcendental organ Dial. She went off to Italy where she was a war correspondent, had a child, and died tragically within sight of the beach off Fire Island, when the lost ship broke upon a sand dune during a hurricane. Thoreau went and searched the beach for her body and found a button. Lost is her book on the war in Rome.
Megan Marshall won the Pulitzer for her biography of Fuller. She has written biographies on the Peabody Sisters and Elizabeth Bishop, the last whom she took classes with. Such a good writer, I want to read her other biographies.
I like the way she goes through a series of friends and is building towards becoming a person. The thwarted ambition and challenges. She calls Emerson an "unsympathetic, unhelpful, wise good man." (p.116). She has been trying to get him to understand her strivings.
Editing The Dial was a pivotal point. Moving to NYC was big. Writing her feminist book made her famous.
She had a series of boyfriends ending in disappointment: George Davis, Sam Ward, William Clarke and James Nathan. Finally Giovani Ossoli!
Was she pregnant when she died? We won't know. Such a tragic end. Lost her book. Was going to be the opening speaker at the first Seneca Falls Woman's Rights convention. Some might have judged her for getting married after getting pregnant, but how would they even know that because we still don't know that for sure.
I absolutely loved loved loved this book and highly recommend it.
I really want to take my daughter to the National Women's Hall of Fame and the Boston Women's Heritage Trail. My daughter is almost 5, I wonder what a good time to go to these things would be. Maybe 15?
Links:
The Desires of Margaret Fuller by Judith Thurman (New Yorker)
Megan Marshall (Wikipedia) Talk by Marshall on Fuller on YouTube.
Timothy Fuller (Father)
The Dial Archives (free)
Washington Allston a painter and poet (1779 – 1843) who's exhibition Fuller reviewed in the first issue of Dial.
The Problem by RW Emerson
Margaret Fuller by Thomas Hicks: She looks tired and put upon.
Friends:
William Ellery Channing: Poet who married Margaret's sister Ellen Fuller. Suggested to Thoreau to go live on the pond.
Caroline Sturgis Tappan an American Transcendentalist, poet, and artist. She is particularly known for her friendships and frequent correspondences with prominent American Transcendentalists, such as Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Sturgis published 25 poems in four different volumes of The Dial, a Transcendental periodical. She also wrote and illustrated two books for children, Rainbows for Children (1847) and The Magician’s Show Box, and Other Stories (1856).
Lydia Maria Child an American abolitionist, women's rights activist, Native American rights activist, novelist, journalist, and opponent of American expansionism.
Horace Greeley was an American newspaper editor and publisher who was the founder and editor of the New-York Tribune.
Giuseppe Mazzini was an Italian politician, journalist, activist for the unification of Italy and spearhead of the Italian revolutionary movement.
Thomas Carlyle met Fuller when she travel through London in 1947(?).
George Sand: She reviewed her books and her life, and met her at least twice in Paris.
Adam Mickiewicz met in Paris, she fell in love with him even though his wife went insane and he'd impregnated the governess recently. Here is a sample of his poems (Wayback Machine).
Joseph Mozier did a statue of her that supposedly didn't look like her, and I can't find a photo online.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning were the last people she visited the night before her trip back to America.
History:
M. Fuller's Essays and Writings
Short Essay on Critics from the first issue of the Dial, signed "F"
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