Fuller, (Sarah) Margaret

Fuller, [Sarah] Margaret (1810–50), born at Cambridgeport, Mass., was educated by her father, read Ovid at the precocious age of eight, and as a young woman developed friendships with the Transcendentalists, who accepted her as their intellectual equal. From 1839 to 1844 she held a series of conversational classes at Elizabeth Peabody's home, and had a strong influence on the most cultivated circle of Boston society. In her discussions with this group originated the material of her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), the first mature consideration of feminism by an American touching every aspect of the subject, intellectual, economic, political, and sexual. She edited The Dial (1840–42) and in 1844 published her Summer on the Lakes in 1843, an optimistic view of Western life based on a visit to Chicago. During her two years in New York, on the staff of the Tribune, she established a wide reputation as a critic, and in the summer of 1846 she visited Europe, writing letters which appeared on the front page of the Tribune. She had intended to publish a book on the Roman revolution of 1848–49, but this was not completed. After Papers on Literature and Art (1846), her works were posthumously published. They are At Home and Abroad (1856) and Life Without and Life Within (1859). In Italy she was an ardent adherent of Mazzini, and married one of his followers, the Marquis Angelo Ossoli. The ship that brought them to the U.S. was wrecked in a storm off Fire Island, near New York. The body of her child was the only one recovered, and her manuscript on the Roman revolt was lost. Her Memoirs (1852) were written by Emerson, W.H. Channing, and J.F. Clarke. Because of her dynamic personality, she figures frequently in literature, being probably the prototype of Elsie Venner, and of Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance. In Lowell's Fable for Critics, as Miranda,She always keeps asking if I don't observe a
Particular likeness 'twixt her and Minerva.