She herself said she “had no natural childhood.” Born into a family tradition of religious fervor, intellectual endeavor, physical restlessness, and Roman vigor, Margaret Fuller was the oldest child of Timothy Fuller, who was the great-great-grandson of “Lieutenant” Thomas Fuller, who in 1638 at age twenty had crossed the ocean from England to America. Touched by the soul-ravishing sermons of the Reverend Thomas Shepard and rumored to have been bewitched by the “black eyes of a certain Miss Richardson,” Thomas Fuller settled in Cambridge. Though he finally married another woman and moved his family first to New Salem (later Middleton),...

A strict Unitarian, Margaret’s father routinely took his young family to church on Sunday and read aloud with them from the Bible in the parlor. A respected member of the political member of the establishment, in his youth he had been rebellious. As stubborn and independent minded as his father and determined to obtain a level of material comfort denied him when young as the son of a poor country minister and farmer, the junior Timothy worked hard so that he could graduate from Harvard with highest honors. An inherited perversity of temperament, however, prevented this: while at Harvard, this...

In her autobiographical romance, Fuller depicts her father as a man whose tyrannical control she, like Mestra, tried unsuccessfully to evade. Her mother she paints as a passive person with a delicate, flowerlike nature, a shadowy figure who played only a small part in helping to shape her firstborn’s life. Time and fantasy have, to some extent, colored Fuller’s memory. For during her first two years Fuller was, indeed, as scholars say, “surrounded with love and affection,” and her mother probably was not as “self-effacing” as Fuller and also Higginson later recalled her as being. If Margarett Crane subordinated herself...

In light of the child’s hunger for love, it is easy then to see how Margaret, age seven, attached herself passionately to Ellen Kilshaw, the lovely daughter of a wealthy Liverpool merchant who met the Fullers in the summer of 1817 during her visit with her sister and brother-in-law in Boston. Timothy thought Ellen, who was about the same age as his wife, pretty, and initiated a friendship with her. In her autobiographical romance, which she wrote during her 1839–41 spiritual and gender identity crisis, Fuller wrote of her love for Ellen that this was “my first real interest...

With Ellen gone, Margaret became more dependent than ever for affection on her father, who had made it a condition for his love that she excel intellectually. Intent on fulfilling his high expectations, she was soon doing just as he asked: reciting not just Latin but Greek twice a week for her uncle Elisha, the youngest and most genial of the Fuller brothers, who was then a student at Harvard Divinity School. At her father’s insistence she was learning to play the piano and also taking singing lessons (which she hated), as well as attending classes at the “Cambridge Port...

In her autobiographical romance Fuller says that the “peculiarity” of her early education deprived her of her childhood. Though seldom allowed to play with the neighborhood children in the marshland surrounding her house, she occasionally joined them in their games, but even then, she recollects, she preferred “violent bodily exercise” to their less-demanding play. The girls “did not hate me,” Fuller recalls, “but neither did they . . . wish me to have them with me.” She tells how her father decided “I needed change of scene.” He blamed himself for keeping her at home because in teaching her he...

On the subject of the effect on her of the early education forced on her by her father, Fuller notes in her autobiographical romance how her too-intense focus on books as a child had “given a cold aloofness” to her outward expression while the intensity of her inward life, as was evident in the “profound depression” she experienced when Ellen Kilshaw sailed home to England, “was out of the gradual and natural course.” Like the violent games Fuller played with neighborhood children, the letters she wrote her father when she was ten reveal her unusually intense feelings, in this case...

In May 1824 Margaret traveled by stagecoach with her high-spirited, sociable Uncle Elisha thirty-five miles northwest of Boston to Massachusetts apple country and Miss Susan Prescott’s Young Ladies Seminary in Groton run by Susan Prescott, the twenty-seven-year-old eldest daughter of Judge James Prescott. There, Fuller’s egotistical need to play center stage was initially tolerated by her mostly Unitarian, upper-middle-class schoolmates, who saw her as a prodigy. In the evening she entertained them by declaiming verses or acting out parts with seeming mystical power that made her “hearer” convulse “with laughter, sometimes to melt [her] to tears.”¹

At least that is...

There was nothing about Margarett Crane’s ambitious, irreverent daughter that would have fit a conventional nineteenth-century American mother’s expectations of what a lady should be. Nor did Margaret seem to indicate any desire or aptitude to be remade into a lady. On the contrary, after returning to Cambridgeport in the spring of 1825, Margaret worked hard to achieve the goal of intellectual perfection that her father had set out for her. More obstinate than ever, she strove to turn herself into an intellectual person worthy of a place at her father’s side as an equal, rather than try to meet...

Out of French revolutionary hopes, the German idealism of Kant and his disciples, and English literary Romanticism, Harvard men like Waldo Emerson (class of 1821), Frederic Henry Hedge (class of 1825), and James Freeman Clarke and William Henry Channing (both class of 1829) generated a philosophy that God was not a Newtonian mechanical principle but instead a spirit that dwelled “within.” The philosophy embraced the idea that, just as God had created the universe, so the human mind, drawing on the power of this spirit within, could by means of the imagination reshape the world to suit human desire. Their...

Fuller’s fluctuating sense of self—her feeling of being at one moment elated and full of power and then, at the next, guilt ridden, conflicted, and vulnerable—fits the pattern of other Romantics. And Fuller at this point was certainly a Romantic. Having immersed herself in their literature, she was now acquiring from Romantic writers attitudes and a vocabulary by which she could express her emotional and intellectual experiences. In so doing she became one Romantic whose self-exploration helped establish subjectivity as we now know it, though from a feminized perspective.¹

During her Cambridge years, Fuller thus began self-consciously to...

Had Fuller stayed in Cambridge, she might have found a way to deal with the problems caused by her inner conflict about her parents. As an intellectual female, she would have received support from her Cambridge friends, who were arguing for radical reforms, including rights for women. Maybe she could have found a way to reconcile what one critic calls the “‘real me’ (the sense of self distinct from [the] dramatization)” with “‘the alien me,’” the public persona.¹

Maybe. But her father’s decision to leave Cambridge deprived her of the chance to try. Timothy’s hope that John Quincy Adams might...

After her father’s death, Fuller wanted a friend more than ever to help her find a “centre” within “the ceaseless fluctuation of [her] mind.” She had begun to see Emerson as this wished-for friend long before she actually met him. She had heard much about him from James Clarke and Henry Hedge and in letters to friends was already being playfully “familiar” in referring to him. To Almira Barlow she relays gossip about “Waldo Emerson dining in boots” at the home of a wealthy dry-goods dealer during his 1832–33 tour of England, and adds, “absolument a faire mourir!” (it...

In 1836, the year he published Nature, Emerson’s psychological state was marked by a need to generate a life-sustaining philosophy from his lingering grief over the loss of his wife, Ellen Tucker, and his cherished brothers, Charles and Edward, a philosophy more satisfying to him than was either “an effete, superannuated Christianity” or the reason-based beliefs of New England Unitarianism. Self-reliant fortitude was imperative to him in light of his haunting memory that both of his brothers, before their deaths from tuberculosis, had exhibited signs of mental instability—Edward’s mind having “collapsed” to such an extent that Emerson had to...

That Emerson’s flow of words filled Fuller’s “soul” is evident in her essay, “Modern British Poets,” which appeared in two parts in the September and October issues of the American Monthly. For in it she focused on writers’ psychic conflict as a sign of the times, arguing that, as society has become increasingly mechanistic, so the creative soul that expresses its “individuality” is “brought into a state of conflict” with it. She cites Byron as a poet in conflict with society. Though in her essay she castigates Byron—whose licentious life was the opposite of Emerson’s of sexual self-control—for...

After her death Emerson observed of Fuller that, as “a woman, an orphan, without beauty, without money,” she had to overcome a lot of “negatives” in order to succeed as a teacher and writer. Fuller’s poverty was significant. Forced, in her words, to “get money,” in the fall of 1836 she moved to Boston to teach at the innovative Temple School of Human Culture run by the affable but impractical Bronson Alcott.¹

Located in the Masonic Temple on Tremont Street, the school when it opened in 1834 had been heralded by Boston liberals as a welcome alternative to traditional schools...

The excitement Fuller had felt in Emerson’s presence, a wild exhilaration followed by a prostrating anxiety, increased when in early June 1837, just a few weeks after her return, she left Groton to teach at Hiram Fuller’s (no relation) new Greene Street School in Providence, Rhode Island. The experience was at first uplifting, especially when Emerson appeared to give the school’s dedicatory address. But teaching was again to prove perplexing. The stress of dealing with recalcitrant students made Fuller’s head ache. For relief she turned to the medical pseudosciences of her day—phrenology, mesmerism, and animal magnetism—which were all...

By the end of the fall teaching term in late November 1838, Fuller was prostrated by pain. Earlier, in August 1838, she had noted in her journal that she was “in a state of sickly unresisting sensitiveness such as I do not remember in myself ever before.” By late autumn of that year, she was so stressed that she had trouble meeting her classes and resorted to asking Ellen, who was still sharing rooms with her on the second floor of Mrs. Aborn’s house, to cover her elementary-level sections in history and natural science for her.¹ In December Fuller gave...

Complicating Fuller’s life the winter of 1839–40 were two new projects she undertook that, though rewarding, were physically and emotionally draining. She accepted editorship of the Transcendentalists’ new literary journal, the Dial, in the fall of 1839. Larry Reynolds contends that this journal was largely Fuller’s inspiration because it grew out of the propensity of Fuller and her friends to exchange among themselves “pacquets” or “portfolios” of letters, prints, books, journal entries, critical essays, and poems, many items of which Fuller later included in the Dial. The journal was in effect an outgrowth of Fuller’s love of letter writing,...

From January 1839 to late summer 1841—during the time of her intense friendship with Emerson—Fuller experienced an emotional crisis that for her constituted a religious conversion. In these “crisis” months, Fuller moved from a self-imposed solitude in nature, through dramatic encounters with friends to whom she wrote fantasy-filled letters, to a resolution in self-discovery that made her think, as William Henry Channing later said, that she was “of the Elect.” In an important 1840 letter to Channing, a Unitarian minister, Fuller speaks of life in terms commonly used by ministers preaching about the Christian journey from sin to...

Both by temperament and by the influence of her Puritan past, Fuller as an adult felt at ease with the idea of religious rebirth. As late as August 1844 she was still attending family devotionals, like one she took part in with her mother and Richard during which she read Charles Wesley’s hymn, “Jesus, My Strength, My Hope.”¹ Still, like Emerson, Fuller had trouble accepting conventional religious dogma, whether it appeared in the literal terms of the fundamentalists or the rational precepts of liberal Unitarians.

Craving a religion of the heart, part of Fuller responded to the more passionate vision...

After she had come home to Groton in January 1839, Fuller focused her attention on the writings of Plato that had enchanted her in 1833. She borrowed again Emerson’s volume of Plato, but this time she limited her reading to two dialogues: phaedrus and the Symposium. In the latter, which Fuller called “The Banquet,” Socrates explores the meaning of love, and in the Phaedrus he argues that love is a form of “divine madness.” Socrates was always interested in eros, particularly of a homoerotic kind, but only in these two late dialogues did Plato’s teacher attempt to anchor eros in...

In her quest to affirm her female self, Fuller looked to find in literature a writer who could point the way to her “spiritual” awakening. So when the family moved to the house in Jamaica Plain, she continued her readings in the classics and the Romantics. She found Wordsworth’s faith in a sublime “presence” whose “dwelling is the light of setting suns” more spiritually uplifting at this time than what one preacher she admired called “the Idolatry of Jesus.” During the spring and summer of 1839, Fuller thus relaxed and let her emotions be drawn not just up to heaven...

In the seductive George Sand, who boldly broke with traditional thought and behavior by dressing as a man, taking lovers like a man, and writing about love between women, Fuller found a powerful woman who would point the way to her awakening as a woman. She loved Sand’s multifaceted personality and her analyses of the psychological complexity of women and men, this woman who, as the younger Henry James said, “put a premium on all passion, on all pain, on all experience.”¹

Sand voiced opinions close to Fuller’s own on the obstacles intellectual women encounter in a culture that saw...

Fuller’s complex response to her female friends during her 1839–41 crisis was thus shaped to a great extent by the literature she was reading at the time, as is evident in a letter she wrote Sturgis on a Sunday evening from Groton in January 1839 shortly after her return from Providence. While reading the volume of Plato that Emerson had lent her containing Plato’s Phaedrus and Symposium (“The Banquet”) the evening before, Fuller had let her imagination run riot over the unchartered terrain of unorthodox ideas she was ingesting from Plato’s dialogues on love. She was especially impressed by...

In her crisis years 1839–41, Fuller struggled with her own demonic desires, even as she was aware that authentic creative activity often involves such soul-endangering confrontations. Unlike Emerson, who decried the demonic as a force “without virtue” and equated it with “Animal Magnetism” and “Disease,” Fuller was fascinated by the idea of demonic forces, of an instinctive power “within” us that is deeper than reason can fathom. After all, without being told its location, the blind somnambulist in Providence, through hypnosis, had put her hand on Fuller’s head where the pain originated. Though the woman failed to relieve her...

In 1839, the year Fuller experienced the worst of her psychosexual-spiritual crisis, her lifelong friend James Clarke married Anna Huidekoper of Meadville, Pennsylvania. Then, Sam Ward and Anna Barker early in 1840 announced their intention to marry. This was just a few months after Fuller had imagined that Sam actually loved her enough to want to marry her. Once it had become clear he did not, she had written him in September 1839 despairing that he loves her “no more.”¹

In the Memoirs, William Channing tells about visiting Fuller at her house in Jamaica Plain on his return from the...

In a letter about a ten-day visit Anna paid her in August 1840, Margaret tells Cary that the two had been “even happier together” than they were in 1839—before she knew of Sam’s engagement to Anna. In another letter three weeks later to Cary, she exclaims: “Rivers of life flow, seas surge between me and you I cannot look back, nor remember how I passed them.”¹

In an 1842 reflection on whether “a woman may be in love with a woman, and a man with a man,” Fuller focuses not on Cary but on her less-complicated relationship with Anna....

Sometime in 1840 Fuller wrote William Channing the letter in which she depicts life as a “pilgrimage,” an ongoing effort to overcome “worldliness.” In it she tells how her new self-insight has helped her to understand the men who are part of the “Transcendental party” and the ways she “differ[s] from most of them on important points.” While sympathizing with their wish to awaken in people an awareness of a “standard transcending sense and time,” she nonetheless feels that these men do not sufficiently consider the role of emotions in our lives. If ever she finds time to think “deeply”...

If it is true, as Harold Bloom has suggested, that we are mature to the extent we relinquish our wish for a “godlike embrace” from “some sufficient love” in a place set apart from the social world, then Fuller’s retreat during her crisis to the embrace of Mother Nature must be seen as a step backward in her journey to wisdom. Yet it can also be seen as Fuller herself saw it: as a step forward. For it offered her, as Romantics promised, psychic healing: a way to explore and affirm her female self, a process she would advocate in...

One of Fuller’s favorite dialogues of Plato was the Symposium (“The Banquet”). In it Plato records a conversation that Socrates had with Diotima of Mantinea in which the prophetess says to Socrates: “Those who are pregnant in body only betake themselves to women and beget children.— . . . But souls which are pregnant—for there certainly are men who are more creative in their souls than in their bodies—conceive that which is proper for the soul to conceive or contain . . .—wisdom and virtue in general. And such creators are poets and all artists who are...

In “Self-Reliance” Emerson observes “what a blindman’s-buff” is “this game of conformity.” It loses your time and “scatters your force.” “But do your work,” he says, “and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself.” Fuller took this message to heart, especially after little Waldo’s death in January 1842 when Emerson, numb with pain, cut himself off emotionally from others. “Well, souls never touch their objects,” he says in “Experience”: “An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with. Grief too will make us idealists.”¹

In loving...

During a blustering May—with the odious east winds beating against her windowpanes—Fuller, who in April had handed over Dial editorship to Emerson, sat down at her desk and wrote as much as the foul weather—and a hurting head—would let her. The result was “The Great Lawsuit. Man versus Men. Woman versus Women.” The title of this Dial essay, which she would later expand into Woman in the Nineteenth Century, points to how far she thought men and women have fallen from the Greek ideal (form) of what each might have been as man and woman.

The...

Within the electric context of religious enthusiasts awaiting the Second Coming, Margaret Fuller wrote “The Great Lawsuit” in which she forwarded her case against every man—including her lawyer-congressman father—who wishes, in her words, “to be lord” in his “little world.” As men in the past had felt called by God to offer mankind a celestial vision, so Fuller, extending Emerson’s call for soul liberty to include women, felt called by God to give birth to a vision of a New Jerusalem in which the relationship between the sexes had been righted and music restored to the spheres. In...

As Fuller was finishing “The Great Lawsuit,” she wrote Emerson telling him about a “really good book” on her desk: Andreas Justinus Kerner’s account of the case of the mystic Friederike Hauffe. In her letter she scolds Emerson for having said in his 29 April letter to her about the birth of the Wards’ baby girl, “though no son, yet a sacred event”: “Why is not the advent of a daughter as ‘sacred’ a fact as that of a son. I do believe, O Waldo, most unteachable of men, that you are a sinner on this point.”¹

A good-natured Emerson...

Like her Christian ancestors, Fuller saw her life as a pilgrimage from innocence, through the valley of sin and death, to the “hill-prospect,” where, by way of “wise” self-control, she would be able, as she had written William Henry Channing in 1840, to “bring the lowest act” of her life “into sympathy” with her “highest thought.” Yet Fuller’s life journey, as James Clarke said, was only “almost Christian.” Impatient with the image of a suffering Jesus on the cross, Fuller thought religion should make her more aware, not of suffering, which she felt she knew too well, but of “unceasing...

On her way home from Chicago, Fuller stopped to visit William Channing in New York, where he was a minister and leading social activist. Channing introduced her to his friends, including Horace Greeley, the progressive editor of the New-York Daily Tribune. Back in Cambridge by September, Fuller, between migraines, prepared for her fifth round of Conversation classes; the first of twenty-four sessions was to meet at eleven on the morning of November 16 at Elizabeth Peabody’s place in downtown Boston. She also gathered materials for a Washington Irving–like sketchbook, her memoir of her “summer’s wanderings,” Summer on the Lakes,...

In Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, Fuller included the stories of two women who sought to escape an intolerable reality: the nineteenth-century German mystic Friederike Hauffe, Seeress of Prevorst, and the fictional Mariana, the rebellious boarding-school student whom Fuller modeled on herself. Into the narcissistic Mariana, Fuller projected the “me” that desired “a godlike embrace from some sufficient love,” a remark that appears in her July 1844 journal. In a June letter to Channing she confesses that though her friends could see her as Miranda in “The Great Lawsuit,” none dreamed that Mariana was also “like me.” In this...

The complexity of human sexuality and gender was on Fuller’s mind as she revised “The Great Lawsuit” while vacationing with Cary from mid-October through November 1844 at Fishkill Landing (now Beacon, New York), a resort community on the Hudson River. In the quiet of her rented boardinghouse room, Fuller felt better situated than she had the previous summer during her restless journey through the West, where she had spent too many nights in noisy hotels to concentrate on her writing. Her evenings now were spent in the company of Cary, singing birds and katydids. From her window she could see...

As Fuller in mid-November was finishing Woman in the Nineteenth Century at Fishkill Landing, she wrote her friend William Channing that she felt as if she had left her “foot-print” on the earth.¹ When the pamphlet came out early the next year, it would lift Fuller into the ranks of the immortals who have helped to shape our shared world with their vision. She had shaken readers into an awareness of the complex nature of sexual identity, as well as of the many unacknowledged problems that women then had to face daily having to do with sex, work, and marriage,...

Determined to live the chaste, productive life she had recommended for women in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Fuller now in New York City cultivated the image of an independent professional woman. As such she made, as Greeley said, “a good appearance before the world.” During her twenty-month stay in New York—where she lived first with the Greeleys in their ramshackle house on the East River in Manhattan and then in two different boardinghouses and in various friends’ homes—Fuller published Woman in the Nineteenth Century (February 1845), a collection of her essays titled Papers on Literature and Art...

Once settled in New York, Fuller had meant to leave behind her personal conflicts. But walled off and denied, deep-seated archaic needs and early acquired patterns of behavior did not just vanish. From beneath the cool facade of a public-minded newspaper columnist, the “many voices” of Fuller’s “soul”—intense, passionate, anguished voices—twisted through her iron defenses and found an outlet in fantasy-filled letters to James Nathan.¹

In contrast to these revealing personal letters, Fuller’s public columns represent her attempt to channel her conflicted energies into a moral vision acceptable to both herself as a social liberal and her morally...

Fuller in her letters frequently hinted that it would give her pleasure to receive Nathan’s sexual advances. On 31 March 1845, after she had learned that Nathan planned to go abroad, she wrote him that she had “a strong desire” to be with him: “To feel that there is to be so quick a bound to intercourse makes us prize the moment.” She responds to his warning that she may never know him “wholly” by telling him that it is important “to know the natural music of the being.” These comments, along with others, made Nathan think she wanted to...

“Truth at all cost” was Fuller’s maxim. And the truth is that Fuller’s past holds the reasons that her heart “thrilled” at Nathan’s touch and that she was shrill in her reaction to him. That she felt her mind folded into his and her body hence eerily out of her control “exposed” her to herself, it seemed, as being no better than the prostitutes to whom she had lectured on their need for moral redemption, women whose “lonely hours” were “haunted,” she thought, by “painful images” of their “contamination.” Afraid that she might actually be as great a sinner as...

Fuller’s letters to Nathan show how beneath the seemingly self-possessed presence of a highly visible public figure there can exist a separate self obsessed with a destructive private fantasy, which in Fuller’s case was fed by her reading of the Romantics, especially the poetry of Shelley. Though she occasionally saw Nathan in May, when he did not come to comfort her she could not sleep, her head ached, her neck hurt, and it seemed that she cried all the time. “Mein liebste,” she wrote him 7 May, “you tell me to rest, but how can I rest when you rouse...

That Fuller in his absence identified keenly with Shelley’s self-pitying protagonists, Nathan acknowledged by sending her a rose from Shelley’s tomb in Rome. The role of an obsessed narcissist who feels betrayed and abandoned, however, only loosely fit her. Shelley’s typical protagonist, who tends to be colorless and amoral, never locates the source of his rage and aggression in himself but blames other people for his troubles. In fact Fuller had more in common with the flamboyant Byron and his defiant, passionate characters: the Byronic hero is a clear-cut figure with a highly developed moral sense who accepts responsibility for...

What could make such an intelligent woman behave as irrationally as Fuller did when Nathan left her? Knowing that when under stress she retreated to fantasy and her childhood pattern of yearning for her mother’s love and needing to please her father does not get to the root cause of her obsessive behavior toward Nathan, the reason she felt he had touched her “inmost life.”¹

Maternal neglect can turn a child into an adult who continues to crave the mothering love he or she was deprived of as an infant. Yet, though the letters to Nathan exhibit such a tendency...

Hints abound in Fuller’s writings that all was not right in the Fuller house when Margaret was a child. Indeed, it is unlikely that Fuller’s erotic encounter with Nathan would have so unsettled her had she not linked it with an emotionally loaded memory of an experience so painful to her that it was “unspeakable.” In her 8 October 1833 letter, Fuller, who had been visiting her Uncle Henry in Boston, tells James Clarke how her attention that morning had been “recalled to some painful domestick circumstances.” She asks him please to “pray for me.” For, “the part” in life...

In the narratives Fuller created about her past that letters and other evidence suggest are emotionally if not factually true, she sees herself as a sensitive child taught by a severe, tyrannical father. In her 1840 autobiographical romance she calls herself “Poor child!” even as she acknowledges that “no one understood” back then that to force a child to perform beyond her development level could cause the permanent emotional damage that she felt had been done to her. Since Fuller’s time, psychologists and psychiatrists have documented the negative effect on a child of the kind of emotional and mental trials...

In an 1839 fragment about her friend Elizabeth Randall, whose physician father had similarly subjected his daughter to an “unnatural taxing of her faculties,” Fuller says that if only Elizabeth had “grown up an unmolested flower by the side of some secret stream she had been a thing all natural . . . bloom and fragrance.” That is, if only Elizabeth (by extension, Fuller, too) had never been mistreated, then she would have been a “natural” woman, like Fuller’s mother, whom Fuller depicts as a rose. Along this line of thought, Fuller will protest in a 30 May 1845 letter...

Fuller’s need to please Nathan (“I am desirous to do as you desire,” she wrote him in May, after she knew he had deceived her) is reminiscent of her need as a child to please Timothy. That and the pain-riddled quality of her love for him suggest that scenes “of strife and pain” occurred in Fuller’s childhood—as does a cryptic remark she made about her childhood in her suggestive 7 October 1833 letter to Clarke: “—It was not time; I had been too sadly cramped—I had not learned enough and must always remain imperfect.”¹ Fuller’s words here...

As Fuller’s ship sailed into Liverpool on 12 August 1846, the peoples of Europe were preparing to overthrow the despots imposed on them by not only the combined powers of Austria, Prussia, and Russia, but also the Roman Catholic Church. The recently deceased Pope Gregory XVI had been an aristocrat determined to suppress democratic reforms.¹ Pope Gregory had wanted to quash reform, which, having grown up during the French Revolution, he equated with revolution. As well he might have. For the 1848 European revolutions, like the French Revolution, had their origins in liberal Enlightenment thinking that argued the existence of...

Before leaving for Europe on the Cunard steam packet Cambria with her reform-minded philanthropist companions, Rebecca and Marcus Spring, Margaret wrote Cary on 20 July 1846 that she went “with a great pain” in her “heart.” Though such pain was “nothing new,” and nothing she could “evade by staying,” seeing Cary before she sailed from Boston on 1 August might help. But if Cary could not come, “know me more than ever yours in love Margaret.” Since she planned only a brief 30 July stopover in Cambridgeport, where her mother was now renting a house, Fuller feared she might similarly...

On 1 October Fuller arrived in London to find no letters awaiting her. Her mood darkened further over the next six weeks for she could not see the sun for the coal smoke and fog hanging over the city. She was also depressed that she and the Springs could afford no more than “fourth or fifth” class lodgings. Such matters increased her awareness of the abyss separating the “parade of wealth and luxury” from the misery that “stares one in the face in every street and hoots at the gates of her palaces.” Fuller wrote in her December dispatch from...

Paris was vibrant in December 1846 with middle-class discontent with the “citizen king,” Louis-Philippe, who had come to power in August 1830, as well as with worker enthusiasm for the socialist schemes of Saint-Simon and Fourier. Trudging through the mud coating the sidewalks and clinging tenaciously to the cobblestones of Paris’s narrow streets, Fuller sensed the same glaring disparity between the lives of the rich and the poor as she had seen in London. During a dreary winter of mud and mist, she found that the ladies she saw at balls, lectures, art galleries, and the theater were generally so...

Though Fuller liked the “great focus of civilized life” in Paris, she still felt like a stranger in “this region of wax lights, mirrors, bright wood fires, [and] shrugs,” in the perpetually overcast city with only one day of nice weather from mid-November until late February 1847, and where her French teacher teased that she spoke and acted like an Italian.¹

Perhaps in Italy, Fuller had written Emerson in January, “I shall find myself more at home.” But she had not yet met Mickiewicz. An affectionate, sensual man whose charisma sometimes spilled over into ecstatic expressions of sexual love for...

Fuller enjoyed the boat ride down the coast from Leghorn to Naples, especially since on it she happened to meet “a Polish lady,” one of Mickiewicz’s former lovers, of whom there was apparently an impressive number. One suspects it was in part Fuller’s meeting Countess Zaluska on the boat that made her conclude upon arriving at Naples: “Only at Naples have I found my Italy.”¹

From the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily (also called the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies), which was ruled by the tyrannical Bourbon King Ferdinand II, the traveling party went north toward the Papal States by...

It was springtime in Rome, where a pagan earthiness exudes from every rock and ruin, and Fuller, in tune, felt her body pulsate and open to the sun, like the orange blossoms whose fragrance lay heavy in the air. On her journey through life she had at last attained “an awesome clarity” about herself, and she was ready now for an adult relationship. She had had enough of airy transcendentalism, of translating every erotic impulse into moral vision. She now wanted for herself something real, reciprocal, and earthy. That Fuller had already found somebody she felt she could “love enough”...

Fuller thought she “saw the future dawning” in Rome and was excited by what she saw. She felt so well emotionally that she suffered only two headaches during her two-month stay. Still, by late May 1847 she knew she must leave the city, not only because she was committed to the Springs as Eddie’s tutor, but also because her relationship with Ossoli was growing too intense. Though part of her wanted to be daring like George Sand or the Comtesse de Pologne, her Puritan conscience damned her for her daring. Echoing terms she had internalized as a child from Hesitation...

On her return to Rome in early October 1847, Fuller missed the red poppies that had brightened the fields on her trip north in June, but the grapes hung heavy now; they were “full of light and life,” ripe and ready for picking off the vine. Though the fields were brown and sere, the heavens seemed serene to Fuller. It was the best time to visit Rome, before the winter rains, while the climate was still mild.¹

Traveling the timeworn Perugia route into Rome, Fuller felt she was entering not only an ancient city, but history. She felt, moreover, as...

From 16 December 1847 until mid-March 1848 rain fell in torrents, making it seem like night in Fuller’s apartment on a street of high houses that blocked such scant light as might otherwise have crept in through her window; she found she needed to light the lamp when she arose in the morning. In daylight hours, a lethargic Fuller had barely enough energy to make her way through the muddy street and sidewalks of the Corso. She spent hours lying on her sofa and dreaming of riding in a chaise in the hills and fields of New England, though she...

The wave of revolutions that hit Europe in the winter and spring of 1848 was tidal; sweeping over the countries of Europe, it lifted ordinary people like pebbles to great heights of excitement and fervor before it dropped them abruptly on reality’s shore a year later. Caught up in the wave was Fuller, who sent dispatches home with news of revolution. In Milan, where the Austrian occupation of Venetia and Lombardy was headquartered and where the people had been boycotting tobacco to diminish Austrian tax revenues, Field Marshall Joseph Radetzky, who had earlier seized the northern city of Ferrara, on...

“Pour, pour, pour again, dark as night,” Fuller lamented near the end of her January 1848 dispatch. Bored with the rain, people came to her parlor to visit, such as Henry Hedge in early March. Hedge, who knew Fuller when she was spending hours dressing—even using a horsehair pad to minimize the disparity in shoulder heights—might have suddenly noticed the difference if, depressed and sick, Fuller was now forgoing efforts to look more attractive. Shocked at her appearance, he later said he thought she had developed a “spinal disease” that made her look “like a humpback.” Both the...

After sending off dispatch 24 in May 1848, Fuller prepared to leave for the Abruzzi Apennine mountains to wait out her pregnancy and write a history of the Italian revolution. Before leaving she wrote Emerson she was sorry that he would miss meeting Mazzini and Mickiewicz, though she doubted he would find “common ground” with either of them. On 19 May she wrote again. Responding to Emerson’s late April letter from London telling her she is imprudent to stay in Rome “with so much debility & pain” and ordering her to “come to Paris, & go home with me,” she...

The conflicting sides of Fuller’s personality—the millennial-minded mystic and the pragmatic pilgrim set on soul- or self-possession—persisted in her as the situation in Rome grew increasingly tense. Confronted with the reality of revolution, she was divided between her need as an individual to act as an independent center of power and her yearning to be totally absorbed within an all-consuming “Dionysian power of fluidity.”¹

This division is particularly apparent in the contrast between the apocalypsetinged vision she sent home from Rome in her letters to the Tribune as the Italian Republic was collapsing around her, and the realistic...

Alone with a baby in Rieti, Fuller found that reality fast dispelled any romantic notion of the bountifulness of the female breast: because of milk fever she was unable to breastfeed her son and had to engage a wet nurse. She dismissed Giuditta, who could not breastfeed. And Chiara Fiordiponte, whom she hired to replace her, soon left when her own baby became ill. Even after Chiara’s return, Fuller still fretted about having been left alone and ignorant with a baby the first days of his life. Had she been in Boston and properly married, she would have been surrounded...

In contrast to the messianic tone of so many of her later Tribune letters, most of the personal letters Fuller wrote after returning to Rome late in 1848 convey a calm humility. Even in the visionary letter she wrote her mother in November about Rossi’s assassination can be heard a plaintive note. She would if she could, she confesses, confide in her mother, whose trials as a mother she is beginning to appreciate. “The thought of you, the knowledge of your angelic nature,” says Margaret, “is always one of my greatest supports. Happy those who have such a mother! Myriad...

All indeed would not end well for Fuller or the Roman republicans. Even as she prepared to leave for her March visit to Rieti, Fuller was twining with her duplicitous words a net of lies about herself from which there would be no exit. For under the Roman Republic, Fuller had to obtain from the Office of Public Security a document that was in effect a passport. One biographer says she gave her name as Margherita Ossoli and her place of birth as Rome, implying that Ossoli was her maiden name and that she and Ossoli were blood kin. This...

Alone in Rome in “these troubled times,” Fuller at night felt the presence of ghosts in the now empty rooms of the Casa Diez. “Strange noises,” she wrote Emelyn on 29 May, “haunt the rooms. I start from my book and my sleep, seeming to hear the rustling of garments and the opening of doors, then all is silent.” In the dark, she says, “black shadows here and there seem about to take form and advance upon me.” She felt the same terror she had as a child when, alone in her room at night with the candle out, colossal...

Despite the death and destruction in Rome, Fuller was able to hold fast to a few illusions. Like any mother, she had her hopes for her baby. No sooner had Rome fallen than she was writing Cass pleading with him to give her counsel as to how to escape Rome. She felt she would die “to be again separated from what I hold most dear.” But for Nino, she would not leave, she said, until she knew if “some men, now sick,” shall “live or die.” Since the French had ordered the transfer of the wounded to the Termini prison,...

Before she boarded the Elizabeth on 17 May in Leghorn, Fuller received a last packet from home containing separate letters from Marcus and Rebecca Spring, as well as one from Emerson, offering unbidden, even cruel, words of advice. Writing from Rose Cottage on 14 April, Rebecca hedges in her letter as she tells Fuller “my most important thing. . . . And that is that much as we should love to see you and strange as it may seem, we, as well as all your friends who have spoken to us about it, believe it will be undesirable for you...