The award-winning author of The Peabody Sisters takes a fresh look at the trailblazing life of a great American heroine Thoreau s first editor, Emerson s close friend, the first female war correspondent, and a passionate advocate of personal liberation and political freedom. "Megan Marshall's brilliant Margaret Fuller brings us as close as we are ever likely to get to this astonishing creature. She rushes out at us from her nineteenth century, always several steps ahead, inspiring, heartbreaking, magnificent." Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity "Megan Marshall gives new meaning to close reading from words on a page she conjures a fantastically rich inner life, a meld of body, mind, and soul. Drawing on the letters and diaries of Margaret Fuller and her circle, she has brought us a brave, visionary, sensual, tough-minded intellectual, a first woman who was unique yet stood for all women. A masterful achievement by a great American writer and scholar. Evan Thomas, author of Ike s Bluff: President Eisenhower s Secret Battle to Save the World "Megan Marshall s Margaret Fuller: A New American Life is the best single volume ever written on Fuller. Carefully researched and beautifully composed, the book brings Fuller back to life in all her intellectual vivacity and emotional intensity. Marshall s Fuller overwhelms the reader, just as Fuller herself overwhelmed everyone she met. A masterpiece of empathetic biography, this is the book Fuller herself would have wanted. You will not be able to put it down." Robert D. Richardson, author of Emerson: The Mind on Fire Praise for The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism A stunning work of biography and intellectual history. Deftly weaving material from the letters and journals of all three sisters, Ms. Marshall . . . performs the intellectual equivalent of a triple axel. William Grimes, New York Times This beautifully written book is at once an intimate portrait of three remarkable sisters and a study of women s place in the vibrant intellectual and literary culture of nineteenth-century New England. The product of twenty years of research, Megan Marshall s tour de force is impossible to put down. Drew Gilpin Faust, author of The Republic of Suffering "

This is the biography of American writer, adventurer and social critic Margaret Fuller.

Together along with generous selections from Fuller's Dial essays, New York essays, Italian dispatches, and unpublished journals. Special features are the complete text of Fuller's famous "Autobiographical Romance" (never before reprinted in its entirety) and nineteen of her poems, edited from her manuscripts. All of Fuller's major texts are completely annotated, with special attention to her literary and historical sources, as well as her knowledge of American Indian.

"Indispensable to students of antebellum culture."—Philip F. Gura, Univ. of North Carolina. "A highly valuable resource for students of American Studies and Women's Studies alike."—Donald Pease, UC-Riverside.

Margaret Fuller--journalist, critic, radical feminist, and political activist--traveled in Europe between 1846 and 1850 as a foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune. Her letters from England, France, and Italy, which began as engaging travel sketches, soon became moving accounts of the most widespread revolutionary upheaval within modern history. These dispatches are now reproduced in their entirety for the first time Fuller met important political figures wherever she traveled, including those who became leaders in the revolutions, and she actively allied herself with the republican cause. Her letters describe how from her apartment in Rome she saw the November 1848 attack on the Quirinal Palace, which precipitated the Pope’s flight from the city and the establishment of the Roman Republic headed by her friend Giuseppe Mazzi∋ how she and the Romans (who included her lover Giovanni Ossoli, a captain in the Civic Guard) suffered through the June 1849 siege and bombardment of Rome by the French army sent to restore the Pope; and how as director of a hospital on Tiber Island, she nursed the wounded who fell in the defense of the city. The dispatches, edited and annotated by Larry J. Reynolds and Susan Belasco Smith, are introduced by an essay explaining the historical and professional context in which the letters were written.