Margaret Fuller (1810-50) is without question one of the most fascinating and provocative women of nineteenth-century America. She deserves to be better known than she is, for her contribution was significant—in the areas of Transcendental thought, American feminism, and newspaper and magazine journalism.
During the period covered by the present volumes of letters, Fuller grew up in Massachusetts, taught young ladies, dazzled her contemporaries with formidable learning, conducted “conversations” (or consciousness-raising sessions) with Transcendental women, edited (with Emerson) The Dial, and, after moving on to New York, served as literary editor for Horace Greeley’s New-York Daily Tribune. After 1844 she travelled in Europe, lived in Italy, became involved with the revolutionaries attached to Mazzini, bore a perhaps illegitimate child to the rebel nobleman Ossoli, and—after the collapse of the first campaign of the Risorgimento—returned to America. On the return voyage, Margaret, the Marquis Ossoli, and their child Angelo were shipwrecked and drowned off Fire Island, New York. She was forty years old.
The editor of the letters, Robert N. Hudspeth, has quite rightly claimed that this edition will present Fuller in a new light. Even so, I think it doubtful that Fuller’s letters are “the best means we have of capturing the whole of her diverse personality.” A distinctive personality emerges here, but it is not the whole Fuller. It is not, for example, the vivid Fuller to be found in her journals or in the testimony of her contemporaries. Nor is it the Fuller
