Margaret Fuller
Margaret Fuller, in full Sarah
Margaret Fuller, married name Marchesa
Ossoli (b. May 23, 1810, Cambridgeport
[now part of Cambridge], Mass., U.S.—d.
July 19, 1850, at sea off Fire Island,
N.Y.), American critic, teacher, and
woman of letters whose efforts to
civilize the taste and enrich the lives
of her contemporaries make her
significant in the history of American
culture. She is particularly remembered
for her landmark book Woman in the
Nineteenth Century (1845), which
examined the place of women within
society.
Fuller was an extremely precocious
child. Under the severe tutelage of her
father she more than compensated for the
inaccessibility of formal education to
females of the time; but, while she
acquired wide learning at a very early
age, the strain permanently impaired her
health.
Plagued by financial difficulties
after her father’s death in 1835, she
taught in Bronson Alcott’s Temple School
in Boston, 1836–37, and in Providence,
Rhode Island, 1837–39. In 1839 she
published a translation of Eckermann’s
Conversations with Goethe; her most
cherished project, never completed, was
a biography of Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe. Fuller formed many important
friendships during this period,
including those with Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Elizabeth Peabody, William
Ellery Channing, and Orestes Brownson.
From 1840 to 1842 she was editor of The
Dial, a magazine launched by the
Transcendentalists. She wrote poetry,
reviews, and critiques for the
quarterly.
In Boston, for five winters
(1839–44), she conducted classes of
“conversations” for women on literature,
education, mythology, and philosophy, in
which venture she was reputed to be a
dazzling leader of discussion. Her
professed purpose was “to systematize
thought”; more generally, she attempted
to enrich the lives of women and to
dignify their place in society. The same
purpose guided her in writing Woman in
the Nineteenth Century, a tract on
feminism that was both a demand for
political equality and an ardent plea
for the emotional, intellectual, and
spiritual fulfillment of women. It was
published in 1845 by Horace Greeley, who
had admired her Summer on the Lakes, in
1843 (1844), a perceptive study of
frontier life in Illinois and Wisconsin.
In Woman in the Nineteenth Century,
Fuller urges young women to seek greater
independence from the home and family
and to obtain such independence through
education. She disdains the notion that
women should be satisfied with
domesticity, suggesting instead that
women should be allowed to fulfill their
personal potential by doing whatever
work appeals to them: “Let them be
sea-captains, if they will.” Woman in
the Nineteenth Century further advocated
the reform of property laws that were
unfair to women—a controversial and
unpopular idea in many quarters. The
book’s unprecedented and frank
discussions of marriage and relations
between men and women also scandalized
many. The first edition of the book sold
out in a week and sparked a heated
debate, bringing issues of women’s
rights to the nation’s attention.
In 1844 Fuller became literary critic
on Greeley’s newspaper, the New York
Tribune. She encouraged American writers
and crusaded for social reforms but made
her greatest contribution, she thought,
as an interpreter of modern European
literature.
Before she sailed for Europe in 1846,
some of her essays appeared as Papers on
Literature and Art, which assured the
cordial welcome she received in English
and French circles. America’s first
woman foreign correspondent, she
reported on her travels for the Tribune;
the “letters” were later published in At
Home and Abroad (1856). Settling in
Italy in 1847, she was caught up in the
cause of the Italian revolutionists, led
by Giuseppe Mazzini, whom she had met
earlier in England. She also met an
impoverished Italian nobleman and ardent
republican, Giovanni Angelo, Marchese
Ossoli. They were married secretly,
apparently in 1849. Following the
suppression of the republic the couple
fled to Rieti and then to Florence,
where Fuller wrote a history of the
revolution. In mid-1850 she sailed for
the United States with her husband and
infant son, Angelo. They all perished in
a shipwreck off Fire Island, New York,
and with them was lost her manuscript
history of the revolution.
