Margaret Fuller

"Margaret Fuller was nearly forgotten by the time of the Nineteenth Amendment's ratification in 1920. She enjoyed a brief vogue as a feminist foremother in the 1970s, her face appearing on T-shirts, her famous injunction, 'Let them be sea-captains!' converted into a slogan." So writes Megan Marshall in her Pulitzer-Prize winning biography, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life. Fuller, if she's remembered at all today, is known for the dramatic circumstances of her death, but at the height of the Transcendental movement of the first half of the nineteenth century she was one of the foremost writers and thinkers of the era.

She was born in 1810 in Cambridge, and received an unusual education..for a girl. Her father, Timothy, who would serve in Congress, educated her as if she were a boy, as she learned Latin early. She could not attend Harvard, but she was the first woman to use its library. She worked for a long time on a biography of Goethe, but her signature work was Woman in the Nineteenth Century, the seminal American feminist work, written five years before the conference at Seneca Falls.

Fuller traveled with some big names, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Peabody Sisters (and, by extension, Nathaniel Hawthorne) Bronson Alcott, and Henry David Thoreau. But she may have been the most brilliant of them all. Emerson hired her to edit the Transcendental magazine The Dial, and later Horace Greeley made her the first female book reviewer in American history. Later, when she left for Europe, she became the first female foreign correspondent.

She was not, by anyone's estimation, a beauty. Even then, it seems, women were not as respected if they weren't stunning. She remained unmarried through most of her life, in fact, she openly disdained the practice: "As an outsider to the institution of marriage, Margaret had little reason to defend it. She had argued with Elizabeth Peabody during the first series of Conversations that for unmarried women there came a time when 'every one must give up' and plan for a single life. Now in her early thirties, Margaret half believed she had reached that point."

But Fuller had some surprises. She went to Italy to experience the Republican revolution, becoming allied with Giuseppe Manzini. Later she would meet a young Italian, Giovanni Orsino, many years younger than her, and they became lovers (it is thought that Fuller had never had a lover before him). She became pregnant, and gave birth to a son they called Angelino. Where, when, and whether they married is still a matter of speculation.

The major drama of her life was at the end. At the age of forty, the revolution lost, she, Giovanni, and Angelino set sail for the United States. The captain died of smallpox along the way (Angelino caught it but recovered). The first mate, in a storm, put the ship aground on a sandbar off the coast of Fire Island, New York. The crew and a few of the passengers swam to shore, (they were only 300 yards off shore) but Margaret could not swim. Many gathered on the shore to salvage, but no one came to her rescue. First the baby and then Giovanni were washed away."When last seen, she had been seated at the foot of the foremast, still clad in her white night dress, with her fair fallen hair loose upon her shoulders. It was over. Margaret would no longer suffer, or exult in, what Waldo had called life's 'sweet fever.'"

As poignant as her death was (it's heartbreaking to read about Thoreau, sent by Emerson, prowling the shore of Fire Island in vain for her remains--her body was never found), it's even more so when one considers her life as a whole, and how her sex cheated her out of a more prominent place in history. Marshall's book is a fine testament to her remarkable achievements, and should be the definitive biography. I will admit to glazing over at certain sections of the book, especially the stuff dealing with the Italian revolution, but for the most part I felt I knew and understood the subject.