Last reviewed: June 2018
American critic, journalist, essayist, and women's rights advocate.
May 23, 1810
Cambridgeport, Massachusetts
July 19, 1850
Off the coast of Fire Island, New York
Margaret Fuller, a critic, essayist, and journalist associated with the transcendentalist movement, is now considered to have been among the most brilliant and important literary figures of her day, though, ironically, not one of the best writers. She was born Sarah Margaret Fuller on May 23, 1810, the oldest of six children. Because her father was disappointed that she was not a boy, she was given a rigorous private education. She could read Latin fluently by the age of six and eventually developed a lifelong interest in German, English, and emergent American literature. Margaret Fuller
After her father died, Fuller turned to teaching to help support her family. At first she taught school in Providence, Rhode Island, while working on a biography of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In 1838 she returned to the Boston area, where she gave language lessons and, on the strength of her broad learning, effective conversation, and radical opinions, became a member of the Transcendental Club. Her remarkable gift for discussing literature and ideas enabled her to organize “conversations” for women and men, and her talents for literary criticism became officially recognized when she became editor of the transcendentalist journal the Dial, a post she held from 1840 to 1842. During this period she became friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others, all of whom were impressed with her powerful mind and strong ego.
Following her successful and rigorous editorship of the Dial (she sent rejection notices to Henry David Thoreau, among others), Fuller took a tour of Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, and New York during the summer of 1843. Her experience led to her first book, Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (1844), ostensibly a travel book, in which she records her impressions and inner responses to the countryside. She describes the Midwest in idyllic, pastoral terms, and sometimes, as when she encounters Niagara Falls, she registers moments of sublimity. Her descriptions of forests, lakes, and prairies, usually viewed through the lens of literary and classical allusions, are richly suggestive. She also hints at a growing concern over social issues, saying much about the plight of the American Indians she encountered, and includes summaries of her readings. The book aroused the attention of Horace Greeley, the editor of the New-York Tribune, who hired her as a literary critic in 1844. Against Emerson’s objections, she moved to New York and pursued her interest in social issues, an interest she found somewhat wanting among her transcendentalist friends.
Fuller wrote numerous book reviews and essays for the Tribune (250 during one typical one-and-a-half-year period) in which she espoused a combination of Scottish common sense, philosophy, and romanticism that she dubbed “comprehensive criticism.” Her goals as a critic included introducing Americans to European writers, demanding excellence, cultivating public taste, and fostering indigenous American writing. During this time she expanded an essay on women that she had previously written for the Dial into her most important book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). This pioneering feminist treatise brings transcendentalism’s Olympian idealism into the social realm, arguing powerfully for equal opportunity for both sexes to develop their inner divinity. Published two years before the first women’s rights convention, Fuller’s book asserts that masculinity and femininity are traits shared by both men and women, and in a series of illustrations from mythology, history, and literature, she demonstrates that the progress of the race depends on the abolition of the cultural enslavement of women.
After the success of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Fuller collected many of her critical essays and published them in Papers on Literature and Art (1846). In these essays she discusses, among others, the composers Franz Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven; major British writers such as John Milton and Robert Browning; and American literature as a whole. She prophesies a glorious future for American literature, particularly if it should develop more after continental European than British models.
In the summer of 1846 Fuller traveled to Europe, where she wrote as a foreign correspondent for the Tribune. While in Italy she became a partisan of patriot Giuseppe Mazzini during the Italian Revolution, writing to Emerson that she now found life more interesting than art. She entered into a liaison with another partisan, the disinherited marquis Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, and had a child by him. The fact that it was not clear whether or not she and Ossoli were married created a scandal. When the Italian Revolution failed, Fuller returned to the United States with Ossoli and their son, but their ship sank just off Fire Island, New York, and all three perished. Fuller’s manuscript for a book on the Italian Revolution was destroyed as well.
Although Fuller was always considered a better conversationalist than writer, her criticism, after that of Edgar Allan Poe, is among the best of her time. There were those who had agreed with her when she had claimed that she found “no intellect comparable to my own”; Emerson dubbed her “the greatest woman . . . of ancient or modern times.”