Margaret Fuller’s Moment

Congratulations to Travalanche friend Tamara Rose of Transcendental Concord, recently elected to the board of the Margaret Fuller Society.

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) was a remarkable American, one who seemed to take part in every exciting movement of her time: Transcendentalism, early Feminism, the birth of modern journalism, and the Democratic Revolutions of 1848. Her death too makes for a riveting if tragic story. She deserves to better remembered on numerous counts, but the wheels of change persisted and she was eclipsed.

Fuller was widely acknowledged to be one of the most brilliant scholars in New England in her day. Much like the better remembered Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she was the daughter of a U.S. Congressman who encouraged her to read all the books in his library. She attended several of the best schools available to young ladies in her time and place (Massachusetts). She was well versed in the classics, knew Latin from childhood well enough to translate Virgil, and studied several modern languages, including German, just so she could translate Goethe. She was the first woman permitted to use the library at Harvard. In the mid 1830s she began to contribute articles to periodicals, and to teach at various institutions, including the school founded by Bronson Alcott,Louisa May Alcott’s father.

In 1839, Ralph Waldo Emerson hired her to edit The Dial, the official publication of The Transcendentalist movement. At the same time, under the influence of Elizabeth Peabody, another associate of the Transcendentalists who taught at Alcott’s school, she held a series of colloquies she called “Conversations”. These were intellectual discussions designed to stimulate the minds of young women, who were at the time expected to be little better than cheerful domestic drudges. Among them was Maria White Lowell, poetess wife of James Russell Lowell. In 1843, she traveled throughout the Great Lakes region, meeting with several members of midwestern Native tribes, resulting in her pseudo-anthropological travel book Summer on the Lakes (1844).

After leaving The Dial at the end of 1844, Fuller was hired to be America’s first full time book reviewer by Horace Greeley at the New York Tribune, a big boost in salary and in readership. She was to be with the paper for four years, in time also becoming its first female editor, and America’s first female war correspondent. In 1845 she wrote the book Woman in the Nineteenth Century, widely considered the founding literary work of American feminism. It argued for the full equality of women and the non-white races, and averred that progress for the human species as a whole would not be possible until white men shared power. It’s obviously still timely. Those who think those notions radical can be safely accused of not having caught up with the ideas of 1845.

The following year, the Tribune sent Fuller to Europe as their first female foreign correspondent. In England, Fuller met and interviewed notables like Thomas Carlyle, George Sand, and Guiseppe Mazzini, exiled leader in the Italian unification movement. Through him, she met Giovanni Angelo Ossoli. The two fell in love, and established what seems to have been a common-law marriage, making their home in Florence. A child arrived in 1848. At around this time, she began work on her next book, a projected history of Rome.

Despite the establishment of a short-lived Republic of Rome, true Italian reunification would not occur until 1861. In 1850, with things getting too hot, Fuller, Ossoli and their child set sail for America. They must have travelled under a bad star. The ship’s captain died of small pox en route, leaving the ship under the command of an inexperienced first mate. While drawing near to New York, the ship ran aground on a sandbar off Fire Island and began to founder. They were only 50 yards from shore, but despite the fact that most of the people on the boat managed to swim to the beach, Fuller, Ossoli and the baby remained behind and drowned. Survivors described their refusal to ditch, the motives of which to this day remain mysterious. Only the baby’s body was found.

Meanwhile, much had happened while Fuller was away. The Seneca Falls Convention was in 1848, making national leaders of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott.The History of Women’s Suffrage by Cady, Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage, surpassed Fuller’s work in scale, though Woman in the Nineteenth Century was the more scholarly as well as the more literary. Several of Fuller’s unfinished works were published posthumously, although in truncated and bowdlerized form. And as we said, the triumphant unification of Italy wouldn’t take place for years after her death either. Margaret Fuller was in at the seeding but gone before the plants reached maturity.

In 1881, Julia Ward Howe, writer of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, who has made Fuller in her youth, published a biography of her.

For much more about Margaret Fuller go here.

Also, see this recent New Yorker appreciation, which marks the inclusion of Margaret Fuller works in the Library of America series. (They’re only getting to her NOW, after over 40 years, and the inclusion of scores of 20th century mediocrities, pulp writers and nonsuch? Does a lot of discredit to their judgment, I must say)