Essays on the American Transcendentalist

Minerva's Circle: Margaret Fuller's Women opens on the Boston Conversations led by Margaret Fuller between 1839 and 1844, exploring the status of Woman and women's rights. Judith Strong Albert has created a fictional session partially based on notes written by participants at the Conversations. She gives vivid narratives of the lives of four New England women, drawing upon their own writinga: Margaret Fuller herself as well as Lydia Maria Child, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and Caroline Healey Dall -- all three of whom were deeply influenced by Fuller and, in turn, influenced her. Their biographies offer parallel views of childhood, life choices and work. These women left profound legacies shaping civil rights, children's education and women's rights in America. Minerva's Circle illuminates the linkage between the four women, the thrust of their ideas and their impact on 20th century feminism, concluding with an overview of the history of feminism in the United States.

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 "

In this book, Catherine C. Mitchell combines a substantial biographical essay with a generous selection of Fuller's columns on topics such as prison and asylum reform, abolitionism, and woman's rights. Mitchell's essay puts special emphasis on the Tribune of the 1840s - its staff, its readership, the nature and impact of its news coverage and editorial viewpoint, its place in the competitive world of New York journalism - and so provides an invaluable context for understanding Fuller's duties at the newspaper. The selections from Fuller's Tribune writings include much material that has not been previously reprinted or that has not appeared in other twentieth-century collections of Fuller's work.

What does one sensitive but ordinary woman makes of a publicly disgraced woman like Fuller, and how do women make use of what they learn from other women? Miss Fuller is a historical novel that also poses timeless questions about how we see and treat the exceptional and dangerous agents of change among us. And it shows the price that any one person might pay, who strives to change the world for the better. It is 1850. Margaret Fuller--feminist, journalist, orator, and "the most famous woman in America"--is returning from Europe where she covered the Italian revolution for The New York Tribune. She is bringing home with her an Italian husband, the Count Ossoli, and their two-year-old son. But this is not the gala return of a beloved American heroine. This is a furtive, impoverished return under a cloud of suspicion and controversy. When the ship founders in a hurricane off Long Island and Fuller and her small family drown, her friends back home, Emerson and others of the Transcendentalist Concord circle, send Henry David Thoreau to the wreck in hopes of recovering her last book manuscript. He comes back declaring himself empty-handed--but actually he has found a private and revealing document, a confession in letters, of a strong and beloved woman's life like no other in the 19th century. Her account of the life of the mind and body, of experiences in Rome under siege, of dangerous childbirth and great physical and moral courage--are eventually revealed to her one reader, Thoreau's youngest sister, Anne. She was the most famous woman in America. And nobody knew who she was.