The Letters of Margaret Fuller by Margaret Fuller

First published: 1983

Type of work: Letters

Time of work: 1817-1849

Locale: The United States, England, Italy, and France

Principal Personages:

• Margaret Fuller, an intellectual and feminist
• James Freeman Clarke, a Unitarian clergyman
• William Henry Channing, a radical theologian and socialist
• Ralph Waldo Emerson, a leading Transcendentalist and Fuller’s early mentor
• Margarett Crane Fuller, Fuller’s mother
• Timothy Fuller, Fuller’s father, a congressman and lawyer
• Frederick Henry Hedge, a leading Transcendentalist
• James Nathan, a German businessman who rejected Fuller’s love for him
• Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, Fuller’s lover, the father of her child, and probably her husband
• Susan Prescott, Fuller’s teacher at Groton
• Caroline Sturgis, a lifelong close friend of Fuller

Form and Content

The Letters of Margaret Fuller, comprising five volumes and almost nine hundred letters, provides a rich and complex record of the life and ideas of this prominent nineteenth century American intellectual and feminist. The letters cover virtually her entire life, beginning with one she wrote at age seven and concluding with those of 1849, less than one year before her death. They are organized chronologically by year; each volume has a separate preface that summarizes the major events, both personal and historical, of the years of that volume. Additionally, volume 1 contains an introduction that discusses Fuller’s life, her work, and textual issues concerning the publication of the letters. Robert N. Hudspeth, editor for all five volumes, has taken great care to present all the surviving letters that Fuller wrote, providing a less biased view of Fuller than that of the often unreliable Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, written and edited after her death by her close friends Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Henry Channing, and James Freeman Clarke.

The letters provide insight into Fuller’s many moods, the range of her intellectual and social interests, and her highly diverse professional career. Moreover, because Fuller knew many of the major thinkers, writers, reformers, and artists of her day, her letters provide a fascinating social history of the early to mid-nineteenth century, in Europe as well as in her native United States.

Volume 1 begins with Fuller’s childhood letters, mostly to her father (who was often away in Washington, D.C., serving in the House of Representatives), and detail her early education. Her early intellectual achievement is marked by impressive precocity; she became a teacher, first in Boston and later in Providence, Rhode Island. After returning to Boston, she began her “Conversations,” designed to enable women to discuss leading issues and writings of the time. In 1840, she became editor of The Dial, a literary magazine and the leading publication for Transcendentalist thought. She wrote of her travels out West in her letters and published an account of this trip in Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, which reflected her growing attention to cultural analysis rather than literary criticism. She published her most memorable work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, in 1845. This landmark piece of American feminist thought seriously investigated the condition of American women, an issue whose development can be traced in the letters.

In 1844, Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Daily Tribune, hired her as his book reviewer. As the newspaper’s first female reporter, she covered the burgeoning New York literary scene and later furnished Greeley with travel letters, detailing her observations during her first trip to politically charged Europe. This trip proved to be one of the most important events in her life, for in Europe she met with leading writers, reformers, and politicians: in England, with the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, writer-reformer Harriet Martineau, and critic-novelist Thomas Carlyle. Her introduction to the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini in London led to her involvement with the Italian revolution the following year. In Paris, she met with the French novelist George Sand (whose novels she had earlier defended to a scandalized American audience) and the Polish poet and politician Adam Mickiewicz.

Volume 5 of the letters ends in December, 1849, when Fuller was making plans to leave Italy. There she met and fell in love with Giovanni Angelo Ossoli; she gave birth to their son, Angelo, in 1848. The final letters signal her disappointment and weariness with the turn of events in the Italians’ struggle for political unification, yet they also indicate her contentment with her new family life.

Context

Fuller is perhaps best known for Woman in the Nineteenth Century, an early and highly influential work of feminist thought first published in 1845. It was one of the first works to deal seriously with the social conditions of American women. Fuller was an avid reformer, both in the United States and abroad, and she was concerned with issues such as poverty, prison reform (in particular for women prisoners), and the conditions of prostitutes. She was also an important literary critic, editor of The Dial, translator of several important works in German, essayist, and—as a columnist for The New York Daily Tribune—the newspaper’s first woman reporter.

Fuller set an example of woman’s independence throughout her life, marrying only later (and that after she had borne a child), and she was censured by her more conservative contemporaries for this and other radical acts. She received an education that was unusual for a woman at the time; she read widely throughout her life, and the range of her knowledge is prodigious.

Fuller’s “Conversations” in Boston are often identified as forerunners to the modern consciousness-raising groups, for they provided women with a forum for discussing intellectual issues that were pertinent at a time when women’s roles were in transition.

Fuller is truly a “woman of letters,” not only because of the copious and highly varied correspondence that is gathered in these five volumes. She was one of the nineteenth century’s most prolific and diverse writers, and her work is characterized by keen insights and probing analyses of culture, people, trends, and ideas.

Unlike other important women intellectuals of her time, Margaret Fuller never limited herself to any one particular movement, cause, or genre of writing. Even during her lifetime, Fuller was considered an anomaly: Her work was considered more “masculine” than “feminine.” She gave no sustained attention to issues that involved other important women reformers, such as the abolition of slavery, the temperance movement, and women’s suffrage. Rather, her wide-ranging contributions were predominantly intellectual.

Margaret Fuller provided the inspiration for two of American literature’s most memorable characters: Zenobia in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance (1852) and Olive Chancellor in Henry James’s The Bostonians (1885). Although neither of these portraits is completely flattering (nor based on Fuller alone), they do indicate the powerful effect that Fuller had on those she met, and ultimately on her culture in general.

Bibliography

Allen, Margaret Vanderhaar. The Achievement of Margaret Fuller. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979. Vanderhaar explores the range of Fuller’s intellectual and professional accomplishments. Also shows the importance of two major influences, in chapters on Goethe and Emerson.

Blanchard, Paula. Margaret Fuller: From Transcendentalism to Revolution. New York: Delacorte Press/S. Lawrence, 1978. This extensive biography aims to correct the misconceptions about the Margaret Fuller of the “myth” by providing a fairer, more realistic, and more historically factual view of her than previous critics have done. Blanchard covers both Fuller’s involvement with Transcendentalism and her later social activism.

Brown, Arthur W. Margaret Fuller. New York: Twayne, 1964. A useful, concise survey of Fuller’s life and work. Contains a selected annotated bibliography of secondary sources.

Capper, Charles. Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. The subtitles of these two volumes, The Private Years and The Public Years, indicate Capper’s concern with the tensions between the private (family-oriented) and the public (intellectual) Fuller. Both volumes are remarkably detailed regarding Fuller, her family, and her contemporaries.

Capper, Charles and Cristina Giorcelli, eds. Margaret Fuller: Transatlantic Crossing in a Revolutionary Age. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2007. This collection of ten essays focuses on the last three and a half years of Fuller’s life, when she worked as a reporter in Europe. The essays look at how this period of her life affected her political views and her literary interests. A must for anyone interested in Fuller or international literary history.

Chevigny, Belle Gale, comp. The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller’s Life and Writings. Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1976. Chevigny’s anthology includes excerpts from Fuller’s writings, illuminating commentary about her by contemporaries, and useful section introductions that summarize various aspects of Fuller’s life and career.

Choice. XXI, November, 1983, p. 422.

Fuller, Margaret. Margaret Fuller: American Romantic. Edited by Perry Miller. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1969. Miller’s anthology provides selections from Fuller’s writings and correspondence, and contains an insightful foreword.

Library Journal. CVIII, May 1, 1983, p. 901.

New Leader. LXVI, September 19, 1983, p. 16.

The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVIII, June 19, 1983, p. 1.

The New Yorker. LIX, July 18, 1983, p. 98.

Slater, Abby. In Search of Margaret Fuller. New York: Delacorte Press, 1978. Slater’s biography gives a very readable and accessible account of Margaret Fuller’s complicated life, including her family background, romantic interests (and disappointments), and friends—both the famous and the lesser-known.

The Wall Street Journal. August 15, 1983, p. 16.