Margaret Fuller (1810-1850)

Sources

Journalist and reformer

Education. Margaret Fuller was a journalist and feminist whose spirited conversation and challenging literary criticism made her an important part of the Transcendentalist circle based in the Boston and Concord areas. Her father, Timothy Fuller, a lawyer and politician, insisted that his precocious daughter receive a classical education equivalent to a boy’s and tutored her in Latin, Greek, history, mathematics, and grammar; Fuller was translating Virgil at the age of six. She later attended a female seminary to learn the social graces appropriate to a young lady, and though she mingled with Harvard students and acquired a reputation for being a sharp and intelligent conversationalist, she always regretted that as a woman she was denied a formal Harvard education.

Transcendentalist Club. When her father moved the family to a farm in Groton, Massachusetts, in 1831, she resented the move and missed her city life. She spent her free time teaching her younger siblings and studying German literature and criticism. Fuller became acquainted with the intellectuals and ministers who made up the Transcendentalist Club during her time in Groton. Her interest in self-improvement, her ambivalence toward institutional religion, and her interest in the new German criticism made her an integral figure in the Transcendentalist movement, yet lacking the educational and professional opportunities of the men in the group, she was aware of being both an insider and an outsider. Her relationships with Ralph Waldo Emerson and other male Transcendentalists pushed her to redefine the nature of friendship, going beyond traditional gender expectations to call for men as well as women to behave with empathy and love toward their friends.

Conversation Club. When her father died in 1835, Fuller took up teaching to help support her family, working in Bronson Alcott’s Temple School in Boston and the Greene Street School in Providence, Rhode Island, where she experimented with interactive dialogues as a teaching method. Fuller’s teaching and her experiences with the Transcendentalists contributed to her successful Conversation Club, which began in 1839 in Boston, and continued until Fuller left New England in 1844. Fuller’s series of conversations, which drew many of the wives, fiancées, daughters, and sisters of the all-male Transcendentalist Club, encouraged women to view themselves as rational human beings rather than as weak-minded females. Fuller hoped that conversation would “lay aside the shelter of vague generalities, the cant of coterie criticism and the delicate disdains of good society and fearless [sic ] meet the light although it flow from the sun of truth.”

Vision. Fuller’s long essay, “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men; Woman versus Women” (1843), was published in 1845 as Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Here Fuller laid out her feminist vision, challenging the gender roles demanded by American society (and by the male Transcendentalists) that limited the intellectual and emotional development of women. On a broader level Fuller argued for an essentially androgynous understanding of the intellect and emotions which would acknowledge both the feminine and the masculine in men’s and women’s minds.

Literary Critic. Fuller was the first editor of the Transcendentalists’ journal, The Dial, which published many of her essays and reviews. Objecting to the standard critical practice of measuring literary works against external standards, Fuller believed that the reviewer had to enter into the spirit of a given work and understand its central vision; only then, with that understanding, could she analyze and judge the text at hand. In 1844 Fuller left New England to work as a journalist and literary editor and critic on Horace Greeley’s progressive newspaper, the New York Daily Tribune. Greeley offered Fuller a salary equivalent to what a man in her position would have earned. Fuller was the first woman on an American newspaper’s editorial staff, and her column appeared regularly on the Tribune’s front page. She used her influence to promote then-unknown American authors—Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorn—and suggested that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poetry was overrated. She praised the work of Lydia Sigourney, Caroline Kirkland, and Anna Mowatt and championed George Sand, the radical French novelist whose behavior shocked most American readers. She also praised The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave (1845) and expressed a wish that “every one may read [Douglass’s] book and see what a mind might have been stifled in bondage.”

Revolution, Marriage, and Death. In 1846 Fuller left New York for Europe, in part to serve as foreign correspondent for the Tribune. She met the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz and the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini finding in them examples of political commitment and intense friendship she had long wished for. She became an ardent supporter of the Italian movement for unification and independence and sent the Tribune reports of the 1848 Italian revolution. In Italy she secretly married Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, a Roman nobleman who had turned republican. Fuller’s relationship with Ossoli fulfilled her long-standing dream of a friendship where two people were “two halves of one thought.” They had a child in 1848 and in 1850 set sail for the United States, but the ship wrecked off the coast of New York and all three Ossolis died. Her manuscripts for what would have been a history of the Italian revolution perished with her.

Sources

Charles Capper, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life: The Private Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992);

Eve Kornfeld, Margaret Fuller: A Brief Biography with Documents, The Bedford Series in History and Culture (Boston: Bedford, 1997).

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

Sarah Margaret Fuller

Sarah Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), an American feminist, cultural critic, and transcendentalist, fought for equality of the sexes.

Not long after her birth on May 23, 1810, in Cambridgeport, Mass., Margaret Fuller's father started to educate her as a wonder child. She was introduced to Latin at 6 and was reading literary classics when she might still have been playing children's games. By the time she was in her 20s, she could impress such transcendentalist leaders as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott.

Fuller loved to talk, so she seized on the lyceum as a way to support herself and put forth her ideas. When she ran into masculine protest against a woman speaking to mixed audiences, she developed what she called "conversations." These systematic discussions with some of the most intelligent women in the Boston area were held from 1839 to 1844. Fuller had already begun publishing, but her most significant book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), developed from such "conversations." It proposed plans for relieving women's social restrictions and using their abilities to the fullest.

When the transcendentalists set up a journal, the Dial, in 1840, they chose Fuller as editor. Her incisive and decisive criticism of literature and the arts attracted the attention of Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, who brought her to New York as a critic for his paper in 1844.

Fuller's reviews for the Tribune demonstrated a first-rate esthetic intelligence. Though she found these duties satisfying, a trip to Europe so impressed her that in 1847 she settled in Rome. There she met and lived with a poor but handsome young Italian marquis, Angelo Ossoli, demonstrating her belief in love and in freedom for women. When the son she had by Ossoli in 1849 was a year old, they announced their marriage.

In the late 1840s, when the people of Rome were trying to shake off papal rule to form a city-state, Ossoli fought for the Roman Republic, while Fuller worked in the military hospitals. Throughout her stay abroad she had been writing for the Tribune; her descriptions of the Roman revolution were her most vivid work. When the revolution failed, the family fled, finally settling in Florence. Here she wrote the manuscript of a history of the revolution.

In May 1850 Fuller and her family embarked for New York. The ship was wrecked off Fire Island: wife, husband, and son all drowned on July 19, 1850, and in the catastrophe her manuscript was lost.

Further Reading

The most recent biography of Margaret Fuller is Arthur W. Brown, Margaret Fuller (1964). It should be supplemented by Mason Wade, Margaret Fuller: Whetstone of Genius (1940). Joseph Jay Deiss, The Roman Years of Margaret Fuller (1969), illuminates one of her most important periods. □

Margaret Fuller 1810-50, American writer and lecturer, b. Cambridgeport (now part of Cambridge), Mass. She was one of the most influential personalities of her day in American literary circles. A precocious child, she was forced by her father through an education that impaired her health but nonetheless gave her a broad knowledge of literature and languages. A stimulating talker, she conducted in Boston conversation classes for society women on social and literary topics. She was an ardent feminist, and her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) treated feminism in its economic, intellectual, political, and sexual aspects. A leader of transcendentalism , she edited its premier journal, the Dial, for its first two years (1840-42). Although she has been identified as Zenobia in Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance, she was never in sympathy with the Brook Farm experiment upon which the book is based. More recognizable is James Russell Lowell's caricature of her as Miranda in the Fable for Critics. Horace Greeley, attracted by her writings, including Summer on the Lakes in 1843 (1844), called her to New York City as the first literary critic of the New York Tribune, from which her Papers on Literature and Art (1846) were republished. In 1847, Fuller went to Rome, where she married the Marchese Ossoli, a follower of Mazzini, and with him took part in the Revolution of 1848-49 and wrote letters home describing the situation for Tribune readers. In 1850, while sailing to the United States, she was drowned with her husband and infant son when the ship was wrecked off Fire Island, N.Y. Her works were republished incompletely by her brother, Arthur Fuller, and her love letters were edited by Julia Ward Howe.

Bibliography: See her selected writings, Woman and the Myth, ed. by B. G. Chevigny (1977); her autobiography, Memoirs of Margaret Fuller, ed. by R. W. Emerson et al. (1852, repr. 1972); her letters (ed. by R. N. Hudspeth, 4 vol., 1983-87); biographies by J. W. Howe (1883, repr. 1969), M. Wade (1940, repr. 1973), P. Blanchard (1987), and C. Capper (2 vol., 1992 and 2007); studies by P. Miller, ed. (1963) and D. Watson (1989).

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.

Fuller, (Sarah) Margaret (1810–50), American author and feminist whose name is associated with the New England Transcendentalists; she helped to found the Dial, which she edited (1840–2), and conducted a series of conversations or seminars for educated women in Boston (1839–44). One of the products of these discussions was her influential feminist tract Women in the Nineteenth Century (1845). Her Memoirs (1852) were edited by Emerson, W. H. Channing, and J. F. Clarke. She is said to have suggested the character of the magnetic and passionate Zenobia in Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance.