Research Guides: American Literature: The Romantic Period: Fuller

Streaming Media

Margaret Fuller: Transatlantic Revolutionary
Biography of a leading female 19th century intellect, cohort of Thoreau and Emerson, embeds in Italian Revolution.
The Margaret Fuller Legacy: America's First Feminist, 1810–1850
In Margaret Fuller’s Memoirs she wrote, “I remember how, as a little child, I had stopped myself one day on the stairs, and asked ‘How came I here? How is it that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller? What does it mean? What shall I do about it?’” During her brief life of 40 years, Fuller made every effort to answer those questions, supported and documented by her inquiring nature and writings, all to fulfill American women’s growing intellectual and spiritual needs. In this program hosted by James H. Bride, distinguished educators Megan Marshall (author of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life), Joan Von Mehren, Peter McFarland, and Joel Myerson contribute to the first comprehensive overview of Margaret Fuller’s life, times, and achievements. The Margaret Fuller Legacy examines her Transcendental period as editor of the first literary magazine in America, The Dial, along with her professional and personal relationships with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Additionally, the video brings to light her Conversations—the first successful women’s studies initiative in America—in Boston and at Brook Farm and her role as the first American female journalist and foreign reporter with the New-York Tribune. The program concludes at the Fuller monument at Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Perspectives & Author's Works

Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

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 acclaimedThe 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 theNew-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.

Margaret Fuller, American Romantic

Excerpt from Margaret Fuller, American Romantic: A Selection From Her Writings and CorrespondenceI must limit my selection of Margaret's writings to only a few reports out of a large and absorbing compilation. Unless these fragments can of themselves prove her case, both in respect to her period and to the modern reader, there is no point in pleading for her. Emerson judged that her writings were naught, and for a long time after her death her friends maintained this fiction. Elizabeth Bar rett Browning, who became genuinely fond of her in Flor ence in 1849, warned, If I wished anyone to do her jus tice, I should say, as I have indeed said, 'never read what she has written. Yet I insist that, in the final analysis, the publications of Margaret Fuller constitute a gallant, albeit a minor, chapter in the history of Ammca's persisting quest for self-realization.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Margaret Fuller, Wandering Pilgrim

"How is it that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller," the pioneering feminist, journalist, and political revolutionary asked herself as a child. "What does it mean?" Filled with new insights into the causes and consequences of Fuller's lifelong psychic conflict, this biography chronicles the journey of an American Romantic pilgrim as she wanders from New England into the larger world--and then back home under circumstances that Fuller herself likened to those of both the prodigal child of the Bible and Oedipus of Greek mythology. Meg McGavran Murray discusses Fuller's Puritan ancestry, her life as the precocious child of a preoccupied, grieving mother and of a tyrannical father who took over her upbringing, her escape from her loveless home into books, and the unorthodox--and influential--male and female role models to which her reading exposed her. Murray also covers Fuller's authorship of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, her career as a New-York Tribune journalist first in New York and later in Rome, her pregnancy out of wedlock, her witness of the fall of Rome in 1849 during the Roman Revolution, and her return to the land of her birth, where she knew she would be received as an outcast. Other biographies call Fuller a Romantic. Margaret Fuller, Wandering Pilgrim illustrates how Fuller internalized the lives of the heroes and heroines in the ancient and modern Romantic literature that she had read as a child and adolescent, as well as how she used her Romantic imagination to broaden women's roles in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, even as she wandered the earth in search of a home.

Fuller in Her Own Time

Writer, editor, journalist, educator, feminist, conversationalist, and reformer Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) was one of the leading intellectuals of nineteenth-century America as well as a prominent member of Concord literary circles. Yet the challenging spirit behind her intellectual confidence and mesmerizing energy led to the invention of an unbalanced legacy that denied her a place among the canonical Concord writers. This collection of first-hand reminiscences by those who knew Fuller personally rescues her from these confusions and provides a clearer identity for this misrepresented personality. The forty-one remembrances from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, Harriet Martineau, Henry James, and twenty-four others chart Fuller's expanding influence from schooldays in Boston, meetings at the Transcendental Club, teaching in Providence and Boston, work on the New York Tribune, publications and conversations, travels in the British Isles, and life and love in Italy before her tragic early death. Joel Myerson's perceptive introduction assesses the pre- and postmortem building of Fuller's reputation as well as her relationship to the prominent Transcendentalists, reformers, literati, and other personalities of her time, and his headnotes to each selection present valuable connecting contexts. The woman who admitted that "at nineteen she was the most intolerable girl that ever took a seat in a drawing-room," whose Woman in the Nineteenth Century is considered the first major book-length feminist call to action in America, never conformed to nineteenth-century expectations of self-effacing womanhood. The fascinating contradictions revealed by these narratives create a lively, lifelike biography of Fuller's "rare gifts and solid acquirements . . . and unfailing intellectual sympathy."

Margaret Fuller: Transatlantic Crossings in a Revolutionary Age

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), a pioneering gender theorist, transcendentalist, journalist, and literary critic, was one of the most well-known and highly regarded feminist intellectuals of nineteenth-century America. With her contemporaries Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, she was one of the predominant writers of the Transcendentalist movement, and she aligned herself in both her public and private life with the European revolutionary fervor of the 1840s. She traveled to Italy as a foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune to cover the nascent revolutions, pursuing the transnational ideal awakened in her youth by a classical education in European languages and a Romantic curiosity about other cultures, traditions, and identities. This volume is a collaboration of international scholars who, from varied fields and approaches, assess Fuller's genius and character. Treating the last several years of Margaret Fuller's short life, these essays offer a truly international discussion of Fuller's unique cultural, political, and personal achievements. From the origins and articulations of Fuller's cosmopolitanism to her examination of "the woman question," and from her fascination with the European "other" to her candid perception of imperial America from abroad, they ponder what such an extraordinary woman meant to America, and also to Italy and Europe, during her lifetime and continuing to the present.

Minerva and the Muse

"The most substantial account of Fuller's life now available". -- Journal of American History "Von Mehren's splendid biography of Fuller fills a need, for not only is it highly readable but it supersedes prior and inadequate biographical studies". -- Boston Globe