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Margaret Fuller (1810 - 1850)
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 Margaret
Fuller : An American Romantic Life : The Private Years by
Charles Capper
With this first volume of a two-part biography
of the Transcendentalist critic and feminist leader, Margaret
Fuller, Capper has launched the premier modern biography of early
America's best-known intellectual woman. Based on a thorough
examination of all the first-hand sources, many of them never
before used, this volume is filled with original portraits of
Fuller's numerous friends and colleagues and the influential
movements that enveloped them. Writing with a strong narrative
sweep, Capper focuses on the central problem of Fuller's life--her
identity as a female intellectual--and presents the first
biography of Fuller to do full justice to its engrossing subject.
This first volume chronicles Fuller's "private years":
her gradual, tangled, but fascinating emergence out of the
"private" life of family, study, Boston-Cambridge
socializing, and anonymous magazine-writing, to the beginnings of
her rebirth as antebellum America's female prophet-critic.
Capper's biography is at once an evocative portrayal of an
extraordinary woman and a comprehensive study of an avant-garde
American intellectual type at the beginning of its first creation.
Second Volume:
 My
Heart Is a Large Kingdom : Selected Letters of Margaret Fuller by
Margaret Fuller, Robert N. Hudspeth (Editor)
"My friend! believe what I say, for I am
self-conscious now. You have touched my heart, and it thrilled at
the centre, but that is all. My heart is a large kingdom.
But your heart, your precious heart! (I am
determined to be absolutely frank,) that I did long for. I saw how
precious it is, how much more precious may be. And you have
cruelly hung it up quite out of my reach, and declare I never
shall have it. O das ist hart. For no price! There is something I
am not to have at any price. Das ist hart. You must not give it
away in my sight at any rate, but you may give away all your
prudence and calculations, and arrangements, which seem so unlike
your fairer self, to whomsoever you like."--Margaret Fuller
to James Nathan, Monday April 14, 1845
This single-volume selection of the letters of
Margaret Fuller affords a unique opportunity for renewed
acquaintance with a great American thinker of the
Transcendentalist circle. The letters represent Fuller at all
stages of her life and career, and show her engaged as literary
critic, as translator and as champion of German literature and
thought, as teacher, as travel writer, as literary editor, as
journalist, as feminist, as revolutionary, as wife and mother.
"My Heart Is a Large Kingdom," unlike previous
collections, includes only letters transcribed from Fuller's
manuscripts and does not reproduce correspondence known only from
printed sources and copies in hands other than Fuller's.
Among the recipients of the letters in this generous selection are
such literary and cultural figures as Bronson Alcott, Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Giuseppe Mazzini, Giovanni Angelo Ossoli (Fuller's husband),
George Ripley, and Henry David Thoreau. Taken together, the
letters serve as a chronicle of Fuller's lifetime and provide
glimpses into her thoughts and feelings during the years of the
"Conversations," Dial, and the revolution in Rome.
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From the Women's Hall of Fame
Excerpt:
In her short life, Margaret Fuller, whose
thoughts and writings inspired leaders of the women's
movement, was a literary critic, free thinker, Transcendentalist
leader, editor, teacher and women's rights author.
Fuller, well-educated and driven by boundless
intellectual curiosity, was captivated by the Transcendentalist
movement in New England, and became a colleague of Emerson,
Bronson Alcott and other movement leaders while she taught. She
became the editor of The Dial, the Transcendental journal,
and advocated the philosophy of liberation and fulfillment of the
highest potential of all human beings -- including women...
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From Distinguished Women, Contributed by Danuta
Bois
Excerpt:
Margaret Fuller, the first female foreign
correspondent and the first book review editor in the U.S.A., was
born May 23, 1810 in Cambridgeport (now part of Cambridge),
Massachusetts, U.S.A. She was educated at home by her father, the
American lawyer and legislator, Timothy Fuller and by age ten she
was reading classics in Latin. Later, she attended a finishing
school in Groton, Connecticut. Margaret learned several modern
languages and was familiar with the literature of other cultures.
When she was in her mid-twenties, she was hired by Bronson Alcott,
the father of Louisa May Alcott, as a teacher in his progressive
Temple School. A year later, she moved to Providence, Rhode
Island, and was the principal teacher in the Green Street School
for two years. In 1839 she returned to Boston, where she started
holding so-called "conversations" in her home on various
topics and many renowned women and men attended these seminars.
Since there was a ban on public speaking by women for pay at that
time, this was done in violation of the law. She was also a member
of the Transcendental Club along with Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
W.E. Channing, Jones Very, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and other New
England intellectuals...
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Margaret Fuller was one of the leading
intellectuals of nineteenth-
century America as well as a prominent member of Concord literary
circles. As a writer, she is admired as a literary critic and for
her sympathies for the plight of the Native Americans. Her
writings covered such themes as transcendentalism, women's rights,
critical theory, gender roles, and political reform in Europe.
The Margaret Fuller Society was first organized in December 1992
through the efforts of Bell Gale Chevigny and Larry
J. Reynolds. The Margaret Fuller Society is a non-profit
educational organization founded to stimulate interest in the life
and writings of Margaret Fuller and to provide a forum for the
exchange of ideas and information among Fuller scholars and other
interested persons.
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From PBS's "I Hear America
Singing" site.
America's first true feminist, Margaret Fuller
holds a distinctive place in the cultural life of the American
Renaissance. Transcendentalist,
literary critic, editor, journalist, teacher,and political
activist, ultimately turned revolutionary, she numbered among her
close friends the intellectual prime movers of the day: Emerson,
Thoreau,
the Peabody sisters, the
Alcotts, Horace Greeley, Carlyle, and Mazzini--all of whom
regarded her with admiration and sometimes even awe...
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Names Index:
A B
C D
E F
G H
I J
K L
M N
O P
Q R
S T
U V
W X
Y Z
| Authors
Index | Scholars
Index |
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