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Summary
Summary
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography From an early age, Margaret Fuller provoked and dazzled New England's intellectual elite. Her famous Conversations changed women's sense of how they could think and live; her editorship of the Transcendentalist literary journal the Dial shaped American Romanticism. Now, Megan Marshall, whose acclaimed The Peabody Sisters "discovered" three fascinating women, has done it again: no biography of Fuller has made her ideas so alive or her life so moving.
Marshall tells the story of how Fuller, tired of Boston, accepted Horace Greeley's offer to be the New-York Tribune's front-page columnist. The move unleashed a crusading concern for the urban poor and the plight of prostitutes, and a late-in-life hunger for passionate experience. In Italy as a foreign correspondent, Fuller took a secret lover, a young officer in the Roman Guard; she wrote dispatches on the brutal 1849 Siege of Rome; and she gave birth to a son.
Yet, when all three died in a shipwreck off Fire Island shortly after Fuller's fortieth birthday, the sense and passion of her life's work were eclipsed by tragedy and scandal. Marshall's inspired account brings an American heroine back to indelible life.
Author Notes
MEGAN MARSHALL is the winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Biography for Margaret Fuller , and the author of The Peabody Sisters , which won the Francis Parkman Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2006. She is the Charles Wesley Emerson College Professor and teaches narrative nonfiction and the art of archival research in the MFA program at Emerson College. For more, visit www.meganmarshallauthor.com ."
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Pulitzer Prize finalist Marshall (The Peabody Sisters) takes on the life of a lesser-known American writer in this biography of Margaret Fuller, whose book Women in the Nineteenth Century was merely the most successful among those she produced during a lifetime of impassioned intellectual discourse, both public and private. Marshall sticks closely to the primary documents of Fuller's life. Though the biography reads as a narrative, the text is peppered with quotations from Fuller's letters, essays, fiction, and personal diaries. This abundance of detail sometimes descends into tedium. Though organized around places Fuller lived, the book's real driving force is her relationships, from the perfectionist father who gave her a thirst for education early on to the circle of academics and radicals over whom Fuller exerted her influence, among them Ralph Waldo Emerson. Marshall can't avoid the romantic scandal of Fuller's life-her accidental pregnancy by and secret marriage to the noble-born Giovanni Ossoli. The couple died in a shipwreck along with their newborn son soon after. But this scandal isn't the focus of the book. Instead, Marshall seeks to render the plight of a female intellectual struggling to balance societal expectations with her lofty ambitions and ideals. The book's success comes from the way that Marshall allows the reader to understand and empathize with Fuller in her plight. Agent: Katinka Matson, Brockman Agency. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A deeply sympathetic life of an exceptional mind, protofeminist and revolutionary. Embedded in the Emersonian milieu as biographer (The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, 2005) and professor (Emerson Coll.), Pulitzer finalist Marshall is perfectly suited to her material, so much so that she frequently takes on the highhanded, emotive tone of her subject. Margaret Fuller (18101850) was the close colleague of Ralph Waldo Emerson, fellow editor of the transcendentalist journal The Dial, teacher and author of the groundbreaking feminist study Woman in the Nineteenth Century. The oldest daughter of a tyrannical lawyer and congressman in Massachusetts, Fuller demonstrated early on her abundant intellectual gifts. However, instead of attending Harvard, she had to sublimate her "unfocused striving and rankling frustration over family obligations" and teach her smaller siblings. When her father died in 1835, it fell on Fuller to take care of her mother and siblings, as a teacher and fledgling writer, yet his death also freed her to pursue her personal journey. Initiated into reformist ideas while teaching at Bronson Alcott's Temple School and plunged into Emerson's circle, Fuller moved from Providence to Boston to New York, working on translations, leading a series of conversation classes with women and assuming editorship of the transcendentalist organ, before restlessly moving on to Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune. Marshall's discovery of a late-life journal reveals Fuller's last beatific years in Rome as a correspondent, when she met the younger Giovanni Angelo Ossoli during the perilous revolutionary era of 1848. Bound home with their young son, the family perished together in the wreck of the Elizabeth off the coast of Fire Island in 1850. Friend of intellectual lights of the day, cultural emissary and author in her own right, Fuller had finally attained her own destiny. Lively, intuitive study of a remarkable American character.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The mind has a light of its own, wrote Margaret Fuller, and the radiance of her inner world vitalizes Marshall's profoundly simpatico portrait of this path-breaking feminist and courageous journalist and writer. Marshall encountered Fuller while working on her acclaimed first book, The Peabody Sisters (2005), and she inhabits Fuller's dramatic, oft-told story with unique intimacy by virtue of her fluency in and judicious quoting of Fuller's extraordinarily vivid letters. Marshall conveys Fuller's passionate intensity, unusual intellect and outsized personality, expansive sympathy, and extraordinary valor as she illuminates family struggles, social obstacles, and private heartache in conjunction with each phase of Fuller's phenomenal achievements as an innovative teacher, lecturer, and editor. Marshall brings stirring historical and psychological insights to Fuller's complicated relationship with Emerson and the other transcendentalists, her journey west and response to the horrific plight of Native Americans, her gripping dispatches on social ills as a front-page columnist for Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, and her triumphs in Europe as America's first female foreign correspondent. How spectacularly detailed and compassionate Marshall's chronicle is of Fuller's scandalous love for an Italian soldier, the birth of their son, her heroic coverage of the 1849 siege of Rome, and her and her family's tragic deaths when their ship wrecks in sight of the American coast. A magnificent biography of a revolutionary thinker, witness, and writer.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
MARGARET FULLER died on July 19, 1850, in a shipwreck off Fire Island. In her intellectual prime and at the height of her influence as a social reformer, she was returning home from Europe with her Italian husband and their child. A major advocate for the rights of women, Fuller had left the United States in 1846, just a year after the publication of her influential book, "Woman in the Nineteenth Century," which both Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton cited as an inspiration. Having accomplished her mission, as Megan Marshall puts it in this new biography, "to meet the writers and radicals whose work she'd admired from afar and test their minds in conversation," Fuller was coming home to the United States, having flagrantly acted out the freedoms she demanded as every woman's right. "Margaret Fuller: A New American Life" returns Marshall to the Boston Brahmin salons of her earlier and deservedly praised biography, "The Peabody Sisters," whose three subjects, Elizabeth, Mary and Sophia, campaigned with Fuller against the sexist double standards that starved women's intellects and denied them agency in any but the domestic sphere. It was at Elizabeth Peabody's West Street bookstore that Fuller conducted many of her celebrated "conversations," unorthodox gatherings of female intellectuals who looked toward "a changed world, with women as powerful as men." Most of those who conversed about women's rights ended by sacrificing their noble ideals to the comforts of marriage. Not Fuller, who walked her talk, endorsing "scandalous living arrangements" over what she termed a "corrupt social contract" that, Marshall adds, "cheated wife far worse than husband." From the time he perceived his daughter's genius, Fuller's father, Timothy, a congressman from Massachusetts, determined to push his firstborn "as near perfection as possible." He lavished an education as fine as any boy's on Margaret, who was reciting in Latin by the age of 6 and who, under a "torrent of criticism," mastered her father's greatest lesson: "Mediocrity is obscurity." As Marshall observes, Fuller's success in wooing her father's attention away from her much prettier mother by gratifying his need for an "intellectual consort" inspired her later headlong rushes into one feverish cerebral consummation after another. A template for love based on a brilliant outspoken female sparring with a man of less acute intelligence was likely to yield an anguished romantic career. In the mid-19th century, even a high-minded man who supported women's rights usually opted for a domesticated wife, preferably one prettier than Fuller. Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the pre-eminent thinkers with whom she would spend her life in discourse both on and off the page, judged her emotionally voracious, looking for an "absolute, all-confiding intimacy between her and another." A sure-footed biographer, Marshall admits to devoting disproportionate attention to a subject that was catalytic to Fuller's emotional as well as intellectual development, the "circle of young 'lovers' who were drawn to the flame of her intelligence" and were invariably left blistered, eager for gentler company. No one likes a conceited genius, and Marshall seems to know that she can't hold her readers for long without countering the arrogance Fuller's accomplishments inspired. How better to summon sympathy than to highlight the romantic disappointments that attended the bluestocking's homeliness and lack of social grace? Fuller may have been sharing the opinion of others when she observed that "there was no intellect comparable to her own" - not in the United States, anyway - but even friends who railed against the highhanded superiority of "Queen Margaret" relented in the face of her often abject loneliness. Fuller was 25 and looking forward to the freedoms of unfettered adulthood when her father died, proving as great an influence in absentia as he'd been when drilling her on the classics. Transferred, along with her immediate family, to the custody of Timothy Fuller's younger brother, Abraham, she balked at being herded from one man's control to another's. Instead, she took it upon herself to support her mother and younger siblings. She taught school, wrote and then sold what she wrote, working to the point of exhaustion and sometimes collapse. Fuller's friendships with Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott and other outspoken dissidents may have amounted to what Marshall terms "a public alliance with the members of the Transcendental Club," but by the time she was asked to be the editor of The Dial (Emerson having "claimed to be too busy for the job"), her essays and criticism had been widely discussed and praised, and she felt secure enough in her authority to steer the magazine away from its original mission to popularize Transcendentalism. For her, "aesthetic culture" was to be seen as a means toward "personal transformation," and with that agenda she wrote and published an essay that would become what Marshall calls the magazine's "most enduring contribution to American thought." "The Great Lawsuit" was a "critique of 'personal relations' among men and women" inspired by Fuller's forays into a world far from the comfortable drawing rooms of well-heeled Yankees. Her "investigations" into the lives of the local poor, including a visit to the deathbed of a young woman who had botched her own abortion, had inspired a "dark epiphany" about the "nightmarish destiny" of most married women, who lived lives of grueling, thankless servitude. The publication of "The Great Lawsuit" lifted Fuller to a new notoriety. Even an intimate like Sophia Peabody thought she had gone too far in pontificating on something she had not experienced herself: marriage. But others paid attention to Fuller's indictment of an institution she termed a "miserable mistake." Horace Greeley, the editor of The New York Tribune, not only hired her but suggested expanding "The Great Lawsuit" into what would become a groundbreaking work of American feminism, "Woman in the Nineteenth Century." With Greeley's blessing, his new literary editor - more partner than employee - undertook the task of exposing the criminal abuses rife in asylums and prisons, supported suffrage for blacks as well as women and wrote biting editorials in hopes of transforming New York into a model society. When she sailed for Europe, the journey was partly funded by Greeley's advance for her future dispatches from the Old World. Alas, the manuscript in her travel desk drowned with her, only 300 yards from land. Fuller could navigate the turbulence of public opinion, but she didn't know how to swim. "The waves" would not have been as "difficult to brave as the prejudices she would have encountered" had she arrived home safely, one mourner noted of Fuller's necessarily controversial and divisive return. In what Marshall identifies as "the most radical act of her life so far" this towering genius hadn't chosen an "intellectual consort" but an apparent sybarite dismissed by her friends as "half an idiot," a person who had most likely never read a book all the way through. She'd left America alone, a spinster, and was bringing home a penniless partner who gave her pleasure, saw to her comfort and knew better than to interrupt her at her desk: in other words, a wife who happened to be a man. The rest of the world might take its time arriving at equal rights, but Margaret Fuller had evened things up for herself. Fuller campaigned against double standards that starved women's intelligence and confined them to domesticity. Kathryn Harrison is writing a biography of Joan of Arc. Her most recent book is "Enchantments," a novel.