Margaret Fuller
(Sarah) Margaret Fuller was arguably mid-nineteenth-century America’s foremost intellectual. Rigorously educated in a curriculum then reserved for privileged boys, Fuller could boast—and lament—that she knew “all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.” [1]
Fuller first met Ralph Waldo and Lidian Emerson when she visited their home for two weeks in July 1836. Her invitation had been arranged through a mutual friend, Transcendentalist educator Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. Emerson and Fuller’s reputations among their social network had preceded their meeting and their relationship was that of peers rather than protégée to celebrated mentor, as it is often portrayed. Fuller, in fact, rather had the advantage, excepting her gender and finances. Emerson, then 33 years old, was not yet well-known as an iconoclast thinker or a famed essayist. He was a minister who had resigned his pulpit, begun a local lecturing career, and was writing his first essay, “Nature”—which Fuller read in manuscript and commented on during her visit. 26-year-old Fuller was already a published author and had translated Goethe from German.
Emerson was, at first, put off by Fuller’s eagerness and social awkwardness. He had assumed her visit was to befriend his wife. But the two quickly became close friends, relying on one another to provoke and inspire their individual personal and intellectual growth. Fuller particularly challenged Emerson’s thoughts on interpersonal relationships, wanting to draw him out of his reserve. He said she made him “laugh more than he liked” with her high-spirited wit and satirical humor. [2]
Margaret Fuller, 1846. Daguerreotype by John Plumbe, Jr., courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.
The chair that Margaret Fuller relaxed in during her visits to the Emerson House. Photo by M. Gordinier.
Margaret Fuller, 1840. Engraving courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Fuller frequently made long visits to the Emerson family, staying—as she did during her first visit—in the “Red Room” across the front hall from Emerson’s study, which the family kept as a guest bedroom. Fuller enjoyed access to Emerson’s study and the side door out into nature. She became very fond of the family, particularly the eldest child, Waldo, who was born a few months after she met the Emersons. During Fuller’s second Concord visit, she joined the predominately male “Transcendental Club.”
As Emerson’s reputation and fame grew through the late 1830s and 1840s, Fuller—struggling with chronic health issues, including particularly debilitating headaches—worked as a teacher to support her family following her father’s death. In addition to her position in various schools, she held adult German literature course in Providence and “Conversations” in Boston—an adult education series especially intended for women. She published German translations, and accepted a position as editor of the Transcendentalist Club’s new literary magazine, The Dial. The periodical never made enough to compensate Fuller and Emerson eventually took over the editorship, publishing Fuller’s feminist manifesto “The Great Lawsuit”—later revised and republished as Woman in the Nineteenth Century—in which Fuller argued for gender equality and gender fluidity, in remarkable contrast to the “separate spheres” ideology of her time. Her 1844 travelogue Summer on the Lakes reflected her travels through the Great Lakes and western frontier, and her work as the New-York Tribune’s “star” journalist brought Fuller to a broader, national audience. For the Tribune, Fuller went abroad as the first female international correspondent, covering the Italian Revolution.
Returning from Europe in 1850, Fuller, her romantic partner Giovanni Ossoli, and their two-year old son Nino perished in a shipwreck off the shore of Fire Island, New York. When Emerson read the news a few days later, he grieved that he had “lost his audience,” referring to Fuller not only as a receptive reader, but also as his creative stimulus, inspiration, and collaborator.
Emerson wanted to keep Fuller’s literary legacy and memory alive. He sent Henry David Thoreau to Fire Island to recover Fuller’s last manuscript and the family’s remains. The search was unsuccessful. With collaborators James Freeman Clarke and William Henry Channing, Emerson edited Fuller’s Memoirs, a project that has been much criticized by modern scholars for its reduction of Fuller’s legacy, but which was intent on safeguarding and furthering her literary significance.
— K. L. Martin, PhD, Emerson House guide
WORKS CITED:
Channing, Clarke, and Emerson. “Self-Esteem,” Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Volume I. Project Gutenburg, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/13105/pg13105-images.html. Accessed 11/2/2024.
Greeley, Horace. Excerpt from Recollections of Margaret Fuller. The Walden Woods Project, https://www.walden.org/the-margaret-fuller-society-collection/margaret-fuller-from-recollection-of-a-busy-life-by-horace-greeley/ Accessed 11.2.2024.
RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FURTHER READING:
Cole, Phyllis.“The Nineteenth–Century Women’s Rights Movement and the Canonization of Margaret Fuller,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, (No. 27, 1998): 1-28.
Marshall, Megan. Margaret Fuller: A New American Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.
Matteson, John. The Lives of Margaret Fuller. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2012.
