In a world where men claimed to have all the answers, Margaret Fuller made it her mission to ask all the right questions. “How came I here?” she wrote as a young adult. “How is it that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller? What does it mean? What shall I do about it?” She was only a visitor in Concord, but this town was electrified by her presence.

She was born Sarah Margaret Fuller in 1810 in Cambridge, the oldest child of Harvard-educated Timothy Fuller, who raised his daughter to be his intellectual peer. She might have followed her father to Harvard, but Harvard was an all-male stronghold, so instead she pursued independent study. “I was not born to the common womanly lot,” she lamented, but must “be my own priest, pupil, parent, child, husband, and wife.”

Margaret Fuller’s childhood home in Cambridge, Massachusetts (photo ca. 1910-1920)

| Library of Congress

She sought out adult mentors, such as the authors Eliza Farrar and Lydia Maria Francis (later Child), who introduced her to the works of Germaine de Staël, including The Influence of Literature upon Society.

Cambridge was full of young intellectuals, and Fuller made it her business to meet them. She learned German in three months, and especially loved Goethe: “He comprehends every feeling I have ever had so perfectly.” In her twenties, she wrote translations of Goethe, as well as essays and even sermons.

English journalist Harriet Martineau met Fuller while touring America and recognized her as a kindred spirit. Fuller dreamed of traveling to Europe and joining Martineau’s intellectual circle. Lacking the means to do that, she found her way into its American equivalent. Through her Cambridge network, she was introduced to the Transcendental Club and began attending their meetings at Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Concord home. 

Another Transcendentalist, Bronson Alcott, founded the experimental Temple School in Boston. “I will make up my mind to teach,” Fuller declared, and got a job at Alcott’s school, but discovered to her dismay that he couldn’t afford to pay her. In 1839 she launched her own educational venture, advertising for women “desirous to answer the great questions: What were we born to do? How shall we do it?” She called her meetings “Conversations,” a thirteen-week course for which she charged $10. She began with the classics—a curriculum only available to male students at that time—but within a few weeks, she had progressed to analyzing the role of women in society.

Timothy Fuller (1778-1835), portrait by Rufus Porter

| Wikimedia Commons

In 1840 the Transcendental Club published its own journal, The Dial, and Emerson recruited Fuller as its first editor. She set high standards and made sure to include work by women writers. She was a frequent guest in Concord, sometimes staying at the Emersons’, sometimes at The Old Manse, where Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne were living.

In Concord, she got better acquainted with Henry Thoreau, whose work she had edited at The Dial. As biographer Megan Marshall tells us, he would take her for “evening rides on the river or nearby ponds . . . in the Musketaquid, the small rowboat he had built himself . . .”¹

Her friendship with Emerson had been so close that “her magnetic personality unsettled him,”² and caused some distress to his wife Lidian. But their different styles—his more aloof, hers more emotional—drove them apart. “Wise man,” she wrote, “you never knew what it is to love.”

Marble paperweight sent by Margaret Fuller as a gift to Ralph Waldo Emerson.

| Collection of the Concord Museum, photo by Victor Curran

Apparently, he didn’t know what it is to pay your editor, either, so Fuller resigned from her post at The Dial. She continued to contribute essays, including “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men. Woman versus Women.”

In 1843, hoping to write a travel book in the style of Harriet Martineau, Fuller visited lakes Erie, Huron, and Michigan. This trip produced the book Summer on the Lakes and brought her face to face with the forced displacement of the Chippewa and Ottawa people. Summer on the Lakes earned the New York Tribune’s opinion that Fuller was “one of the most original as well as intellectual of American women.”

Cover of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 1845. Source: Joel Myerson Collection of Nineteenth-Century American Literature/William Munroe Special Collections, Concord Free Public Library

The Tribune’s publisher, Horace Greeley, hired Fuller as his paper’s literary editor and proposed expanding her essay “The Great Lawsuit” into a book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, published in 1845. “We would have every path laid open to Woman as freely as to Man,” she wrote. “If you ask me what offices they may fill, I reply—any . . . let them be sea-captains, if you will.”

In 1846, Greeley sent her to Europe as a foreign correspondent—the first American woman to hold such a post. As a literary figure herself, she had the chance to meet the continent’s leading intellectuals and activists and engage them in dialogue. She traveled to Rome in time to witness the revolution to unify Italy and transform herself from a travel writer into a war correspondent.

From Rome, Fuller sent Emerson a gift of a marble egg, “a piece of the porphyry pavement of the Pantheon,” which can now be seen in the Concord Museum.

Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, undated, photograph by H. G. Smith

| Houghton Library, Harvard University

In Rome she met a young Italian, Giovanni Ossoli, and that encounter changed her life forever. “I have not been so well since I was a child, nor so happy ever,” she wrote, enthralled by his “unspoiled affections, pure and constant.” In September 1848 she gave birth to their son Angelo.

When the movement to unify Italy was defeated in 1849, Fuller decided to return to the U.S. with Ossoli and their son. They booked passage on a merchant ship, but on July 19, 1850, a storm wrecked and sank the ship off Fire Island, New York. Margaret and Giovanni were lost, and only the body of their son was recovered.

She was only forty years old when she died, but in that short time she had become one of America’s most respected public intellectuals, male or female. She was an educator, author, editor, critic, journalist, feminist, and advocate for prison reform and Native rights.

She was all but forgotten for over a century. Today, thanks to excellent biographies by Charles Capper, Megan Marshall, and John Matteson, Fuller has reclaimed her rightful place in American thought and literature.

NOTES

1 Megan Marshall. Margaret Fuller: A New American Life. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. 2 Ibid.