Fuller, Margaret (1810–1850), critic, journalist, and transcendentalist leader.Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Margarett Crane and Timothy Fuller, a four‐term Republican congressman, Margaret Fuller received through her father's tutoring and private schooling the same advanced classical education available to boys of Boston‐Cambridge's intellectually ambitious Unitarian elite, which she supplemented by self‐education in the entire canon of European literature. Lacking a commensurate professional outlet, she soon carved out one for herself in the emerging transcendentalist movement. After teaching in its schools in
Boston and Providence, in 1839 she started a five‐year series of “Conversations” for Boston's liberal and reform‐minded women. In 1840–1842 she edited the transcendentalists’ newly founded magazine, the
Dial. In
Summer on the Lakes (1844), she offered a self‐reflexive critique of the American
West based on her previous summer's journey through the Great Lakes region.
Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) was a pioneering philosophical study of womanhood and a prophetic plea for women's emancipation from social and psychological constraints.
In 1844 Fuller moved to New York to become the literary editor of Horace Greeley's
New‐York Tribune, regularly reviewing current books and the city's cultural events and benevolent institutions. In
Papers on Literature and Art (1846), a collection of her criticism from the
Dial, the
Tribune, and other periodicals, she applied her Romantic cultural theories to both classic European works and to America's emerging
popular culture. In 1846 she sailed to Europe as the
Tribune’s correspondent. Here she formed friendships with Giuseppe Mazzini and other prominent social Romantic exiles and ardently supported Italy's struggle for republican unification and independence. During the Roman Revolution of 1848–1849, she chronicled political developments in Italy and Europe from an increasingly socialist point of view. During the French siege of Rome she directed the city's principal hospital. After Rome's fall she fled to Florence, from which the following year she embarked for New York. She drowned with her husband, Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, a former officer in the Roman Republican Guard, and their out‐of‐wedlock, two‐year‐old son in a shipwreck off Fire Island.
Fuller was America's first public intellectual woman of letters. Her transcendentalist writings, along with those of Ralph Waldo
Emerson and Henry David
Thoreau, constitute the circle's most sustained effort to combine social reform and the Romantic claims of psychological self‐development. As the first theoretical considerations of
gender in America, her feminist writings would remain influential through the twentieth century. Her criticism prefigured the two central themes of modern American critical discourse: finding a place for imaginative art and
literature in a market‐driven, democratic culture and making American culture identity an integral part of the modern western conversation. America's quintessential questing Romantic, Fuller eventually became its first avant‐garde, cosmopolitan intellectual.
See also
Feminism;
Journalism;
Romantic Movement;
Transcendentalism;
Unitarianism and Universalism;
Women's Rights Movements.
Bibliography
Charles Capper , Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, vol. 1, The Private Years, 1992.
Bell Gale Chevigny , The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller's Life and Writings, 1976, reprinted 1994.
Charles Capper
