Oil painting of Margaret Fuller by Thomas Hicks, 1848 (National Portrait Gallery) and frontispiece from first edition of Woman in the Nineteenth Century.
Margaret Fuller was a polymathic intellect and writer, simultaneously ahead of her time and deeply enmeshed in the social and political fabric of her era. Part of the circle of Concord Transcendentalists that included Emerson and Thoreau, she resolutely went her own way, penning the foundational work of American feminism, merging book reviews and social commentary in her journalism, and traveling to revolution-wracked Italy as a war correspondent.
Margaret Fuller: Collected Writings
“Humanity is divided into Men, Women, and Margaret Fuller,” Edgar Allan Poe said of her, though she may have seen it somewhat differently: “We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down,” she wrote in Woman in the Nineteenth Century. “We would have every path laid open to Woman as freely as to Man.”
The recent Library of America volume of Fuller’s writings—the first new edition of her works in a generation and the most comprehensive ever published—presents this singular voice in all its complexity. Indeed, so multifarious is her output that three separate editors were needed to assemble this definitive collection.
Below, volume editors Brigitte Bailey, Noelle A. Baker, and Megan Marshall discuss Fuller’s incandescent genius, her Hollywood-worthy biography, and the challenges of rescuing her authentic voice from censorship.
LOA: Fuller’s writing sprang from a remarkable and unusual life. Could you give a brief sketch of her biography and literary trajectory?
Megan Marshall: Margaret Fuller is part of what you might call the Transcendentalist triumvirate of Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller. But Fuller is a much more complicated figure. She didn’t “travel a good deal” in just one town, Concord, MA, as Thoreau said about himself, or feel, like Emerson, that “my giant goes with me wherever I go.” She moved on from New England, took on many new challenges, and while she was very much a part of that group, you cannot really peg her as one kind of writer—not an essayist, not a novelist.
Brigitte Bailey: We often think of Fuller as writing two books, Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 and Woman in the Nineteenth Century, but most of her published work appeared in periodicals right at the moment when print culture, especially newspapers and magazines, was exploding in the United States. When she moved from Boston to New York to write for Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune after editing the Transcendentalist magazine The Dial, she tried to explain to her friends why she was leaving the higher calling of philosophical prose to write for a newspaper. By shifting, in part, from analyzing the works of “genius” (such as Goethe) in The Dial to writing for a burgeoning newspaper-reading audience, she embraced the popular press as a public intellectual who saw the medium’s potential for what she called, in a letter to James Freeman Clarke, the “great work of mutual education.” Her writing became more direct and more political. But she also integrated some of her earlier philosophical concerns into the more direct style of journalism—as during her reporting of the Siege of Rome.
MM: In 1846, Fuller traveled to Europe with a commission from the Tribune to report on what she saw and experienced. By 1848 there were revolutions across Europe, and she was in Rome for the rise and fall of the second Republic. By then she was much more than a reporter; she was fully integrated with the cause, personally and politically. She’d fallen in love with a young soldier in the Civic Guard, Giovanni Ossoli, with whom she had a child, in secret, so she could avoid scandal and continue her political reporting. She supervised a hospital, overseeing care of the wounded when French troops laid siege to the city and eventually overthrew the Republic, restoring the Pope to power. She was there for all of it, engaged in a way that is absolutely inspiring. For Fuller, this was “my America,” the moment of revolutionary glory she’d been born too late to experience back home.
One year later, at age forty, she died in a shipwreck, returning to America with Ossoli and their child. Her remains were never found, nor was the manuscript of the book on the Italian uprising she’d hoped to publish when she reached the United States.
Engraving of Fuller, 1872 (Public Domain) and illustration depicting Fuller’s death (New York Public Library)
LOA: It’s unusual for a Library of America book to have more than one editor. Can you talk about collaborating on this volume and some of the challenges posed by the material?
MM: Originally, Library of America asked me to edit the volume because I had written a biography of Fuller, but I knew it was more than I could handle alone. Fuller’s writing life was so complex and varied. I would need someone like Brigitte Bailey, who is well-versed in the print culture of the time, and Noelle Baker, who has extensive experience with complicated manuscripts. I was very fortunate that they were willing to join this cause.
Noelle A. Baker: We’ve frequently commented to one another that no one person could have completed this volume. The three of us have different strengths, and we’ve needed them throughout the course of this project. We would meet once a month via phone and have wonderful conversations, deliberating not only the narrative arc that we hoped to create, but also questions that were specific to our areas of expertise.
MM: One question that extended across all the material—the magazine work, the books, the letters and unpublished manuscripts—was what to do with her poetry. The poetry had not been included in many anthologies before, and when it was, it was as a separate section. But Fuller wrote poems in her books, in her letters, in her journals—they were everywhere. So one of our early editorial decisions was to let the poems appear where they did originally, embedded in the prose, and then provide an index for readers to look up specific poems.
NAB: As in the case of the embedded poetry, Fuller’s unpublished manuscripts present an array of editorial questions requiring resolution. Her papers are scattered throughout several repositories. Many are catalogued and dated incorrectly. They have differing degrees of legibility and come in different material formats. Some journals are composed of loose sheets, occasionally bound with thread or ribbon. Others are in bound volumes. Others are reconfigured ghosts of the original: in one case, after her death, William Hull Clarke, one of Fuller’s former love interests, created a journal by selectively following the lines of her pen on tracing paper—in some cases mistaking her handwriting or deliberately omitting words, lines, and pages from the original. Finally, some papers catalogued as journals are actually unrelated fragments.
An atypically well-preserved journal fascicle that Fuller constructed with letter paper and bound with a ribbon (Houghton Library, Harvard University)
The reasons for this disorder vary, but most of the damage occurred posthumously. After her death, her friends Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Freeman Clarke, and William Henry Channing began assembling materials for a memoir and selected writings of Fuller, and in the process, they wreaked havoc on her papers. They excised and separated her journals. They effaced lines of text they considered radical or unwomanly. They regularized her writing with multicolored pens and pencils. They generated complete misrepresentations: in one example, a transcription of a journal fragment, in a hand other than Fuller’s, with accompanying commentary from the editors, is pasted onto an authentic journal fragment and then defaced again with inked-out lines and substituted words.
Another example is Fuller’s expression of faith, “A Credo,” which is at Boston Public Library. It’s corrected throughout, in two different colored pens, emending her spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and word choice. But then one passage is heavily inked out. Evidently, one person regularized Fuller’s spelling, capitalization, and punctuation, and then either the same person with different ink or another individual canceled the statement altogether.
I spent a full day at the library with scans and special lights trying to see what was underneath that heavily canceled passage. Finally the curator gave me a microscope with an LED light that attaches to an iPhone’s camera and amplifies images by two hundred percent. With it I painstakingly photographed 180 images of those lines. Fortunately, Fuller’s ink was brown and the other two inks were different shades of gray, and I finally did decipher the passage. That resolution felt like a triumph, but it is only one of many challenging textual cruxes in her unpublished manuscripts.
Example of a heavily canceled passage in one of Fuller’s papers (Boston Public Library) and magnified image revealing different inks (courtesy Noelle A. Baker)
LOA: Fuller is a foundational figure in American feminism, and she articulates views on gender that retain a radical power even today. Can you discuss this vital strain in her writing?
MM: Fuller was the oldest child of a very ambitious lawyer-politician father, who saw right away what a genius he had on his hands. He gave her an exacting classical education, as if she were a boy. This is where you see the beginnings of her sense of gender. She had it drilled into her that she was exceptional for a girl, which she didn’t feel all that comfortable with in the end.
She cared a great deal about women and had many close women friends, and didn’t want to be alienated from her female self. But the messages from her father, and from the society in which she grew up, led her to feel painfully divided, as if she possessed “a man’s mind and a woman’s heart.” As her thinking on gender developed, she worked to reconcile this dichotomy—“the great radical dualism,” she called it—leading to a very original statement in Woman in the Nineteenth Century: “There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.” She believed that every person had their own unique combination of those qualities.
BB: When my students read excerpts from Woman in the Nineteenth Century, they go, “Oh, gender fluidity,” which of course is not a term Fuller had. But they understand it right away. I find this heartening, but it’s also a reminder of how forward-thinking Fuller was. She’s trying to articulate a vocabulary that doesn’t quite exist yet.
The scholar Bell Gale Chevigny once said that whenever late-twentieth century feminist thinkers figured something out about power or gender or ideology, they discovered that Fuller was already there. I think the reason she is so exciting for so many people over the last generation or two is because she articulated things that became urgent again.
Detail from the only known daguerreotype of Fuller, 1846 (Public Domain)
NAB: Fuller’s advocacy for women to reject “the great radical dualism” emerged in part from her awareness of the cultural origins of women’s inequity, an understanding she attained through her direct observation of the legal, religious, and marital circumstances that circumscribed feminine self-expression. She witnessed such fetters in her friends’ marriages, in conversation with women imprisoned for ostensible sex crimes, and in her own lived experience. “I feel within myself an immense power,” she exclaims in a mid-1840s journal entry, “but I cannot bring it out. I stand a barren vine stock from which no grape will swell though the richest wine is slumbering in its root.”
She saw the necessity of educating women, encouraging their independence and sense of self. She sought to eradicate the “separate sphere” ideology in America, in which men led the public sphere of professional life, leadership opportunities, economic affairs, and conversely, relegated women to a private sphere of domestic matters and childrearing. It’s not surprising that Fuller would compare marriage to slavery or sex work, and she urged women to remain single so they could concentrate on their individual development. In this sense she anticipated not only the twentieth-century feminist thinkers Bell Gale Chevigny references but also the second American feminist philosopher, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whose radical views on religion, women’s reproductive rights, and divorce alienated many members of the women’s suffrage movement she led with Susan B. Anthony. But these rights are as foundational today as Fuller believed them to be in the nineteenth century.
Fuller’s public voice was quite different from her private voice. The former is educated, confidently informed, authoritative, befitting the most well-read woman or man in America, as she was known contemporaneously. But in her private writing, you see something quite different.
Her feminist philosophical theories came to bear on the women’s rights movement that transpired right around the time Fuller died. Ironically, Fuller was invited to be a speaker at one of the earliest New England women’s rights conventions, but she did not receive the letter because she had already left Italy to return to the United States.
Even in her physical absence, we can see Fuller’s feminist philosophy reflected in the famous Seneca Falls Convention tract authored by Cady Stanton and Quaker activists in 1848, the “Declaration of Sentiments.” One wonders how Fuller’s feminism would have enriched that movement had she lived.
LOA: Fuller’s progressive political vision went beyond the plight of women to encompass the abolition of slavery, prison and antipoverty reform, and the dispossession of American Indians. Where did her sense of social justice spring from?
BB: There are different threads feeding into the social justice aspect of Fuller’s writing, but one is from the Transcendentalists. If you believe that every human being has divinity within them that needs to be developed, then you’re going to sign up for abolitionism and women’s rights.
What’s fascinating is how Fuller’s sense of social justice deepened and developed. It didn’t change in its central thrust, but as she moved geographically, she found more specific objects for it.
For example, when she went to New York City, she and her friend William Henry Channing visited prisons and asylums, and she attended meetings of the newly formed New York Prison Association. She went to some of the poorest sections of town, such as Five Points. This gave a more concrete and graphic quality to her prose. It didn’t mean that she disregarded her earlier thinking about human worth, but now she could present her readers with examples: a human being, a physical structure, one of these reform or carceral institutions.
Engraving of the mental institution on Blackwell’s Island, New York, c. 1853 (New York Public Library)
You see this in her work for the New-York Tribune as a book reviewer. In one piece we included, she discusses the memoirs of Thomas L. McKenney, a former head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs who wrote a damning critique of U.S. policy toward American Indians. Fuller draws on her own observations as well as reading she did on American Indian tribes in the upper Midwest for Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, and creates, as she sometimes does, a kind of sermon, a jeremiad: it’s no longer a book review, it’s a castigation of U.S. policy and a call for the United States to live up to its democratic promise.
LOA: Alongside Fuller’s copious published writings, this volume also includes a wide selection of unpublished pieces and correspondence. How does this material expand our understanding of her?
NAB: Fuller’s public voice was quite different from her private voice. The former is educated, confidently informed, authoritative, befitting the most well-read woman or man in America, as she was known contemporaneously. But in her private writing, you see something quite different. Her voice is often full of self-doubt, concern about writing failures, and frustrated ambition. She despairs of attempting dramas and plays, only to put them away because she can’t capture her vision. You also see emotional trauma resulting from her close and sometimes unrequited relationships with men and women, and her intense desire for a child, an experience she didn’t enjoy until the end of her life.
These private writings reveal a human being who is fully alive and experimenting with pen in hand. You find a love letter to Beethoven, a poem called “Drachenfels” written primarily from the perspective of a dragon and set on a hill on the Rhine River, experimental life writing (including one, “Fictional Autobiographical Fragment,” in which Fuller fashions herself as a man), and expressions of her eclectic faith.
MM: As with many women of the nineteenth century, Fuller’s unpublished writing is very important, not to be discounted because this material wasn’t written for publication. Her letters in particular chart the full arc of her life, beginning with her first surviving letter, which is just one line. She can barely print legibly, but she writes, “Dear father, it is a heavy storm. I hope you will not have to come home in it.”
When I read that, I thought, this is where the biography has to start. She’s already worrying about a storm and coming home in it, and that’s how she died! And in one of her final letters, as she’s embarking on the voyage home to the United States from Italy, she confides that she’s “absurdly fearful” about how the trip will go.
In between, the letters trace her relationships, such as her friendship with Caroline Sturgis, who began as Fuller’s pupil but became more of a peer, one who sometimes tested Margaret. Sturgis questions the propriety of some of what Fuller wrote in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, but Fuller defends herself. We also find that Sturgis’s father is concerned about his daughter’s friendship with this Transcendentalist, and that provokes Fuller to define what kind of Transcendentalist she is. That’s another wonderful letter.
Sturgis is also one of the few people to whom Fuller will confide, when she’s in Rome and fears for her and Ossoli’s lives, that they have a child. Would Sturgis take charge of this child if Fuller and Ossoli were to die in the revolution? That’s a very moving, lifelong friendship, similar to Fuller’s lifelong friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson. I’ve included several letters in which Emerson and Fuller are having a back and forth about whether they can be true friends or not, and Fuller, in the end, feels he may not be up to her standards of friendship.
1857 daguerrotype of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Josiah Johnson Hawes, Public Domain)
Another notable correspondence is with an Italian woman of high social standing, Costanza Arconati-Visconti. Fuller relies on this friendship through her years in Italy, and there’s a remarkable letter in which she reveals her relationship with Ossoli, admits that she’d concealed her child, and also announces that, since the fall of the Roman Republic, “I am more radical than ever.” Will Arconati-Visconti remain her friend? I’m not going to give a spoiler, but the answer comes in a follow-up letter.
LOA: Despite the force and originality of her ideas, Fuller’s writing can be somewhat daunting for modern readers. Where might you suggest newcomers to Fuller begin, and what are some of your favorite pieces from the volume?
BB: From The Dial, three short, mystical, visionary pieces show Fuller working with gender issues and archetypal symbols: “The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain,” “Leila,” and “Yuca Filamentosa.” Here we find a very different Fuller from the critic whose “analytic process,” as she says in “A Short Essay on Critics,” judges a cultural work and interprets it for the reader. But I like their juxtaposition with a critical piece called “Bettine Brentano and Her Friend Günderode,” which discusses an epistolary novel based on a real exchange between the German writer Bettine Brentano and another woman. Here, Fuller works through issues of male-female relationships and those between women that will later lead to Woman in the Nineteenth Century, but it’s more accessible, more readable.
One unexpected piece is Fuller’s review of a book called Etherology; or The Philosophy of Mesmerism and Phrenology. Most Fuller compilers avoid that one, but it pays attention to the body and bodily manifestations of spiritual, psychological experiences. This was a major topic in the press of the time: phrenology, mesmerism, hypnotism. These pseudosciences were popular among women because they had feminist political connotations, suggesting that women could bypass establishment credentialing and become authorities on spiritual subjects. Even though Fuller stays on the fence in terms of her own belief, we wanted to include her engagement with this important thread of the period.
What I would recommend to new readers are the European dispatches to the New-York Tribune, especially the last fifty pages, where she is writing about the Roman Revolution. It’s a great narrative, where she’s covering a pro-democracy revolution to which she’s intensely personally and politically committed. It’s as if her thinking converges on this historical moment and she knows it. Her in-progress manuscript about the revolution disappeared into the Atlantic when she died, but these dispatches are a great way to access a condensed version of Fuller, where a lot comes together in very direct prose.
1849 illustration of French troops marching on Rome and 1850 painting of a dying Roman patriot by Gerolamo Induno (Public Domain)
NAB: In the unpublished writings section, I think readers will be fascinated by Fuller’s accounts in her “Reflections Journal” (c. 1839) of her vividly Gothic dreams, some of which bear on her death. Similarly compelling is her description of childhood nightmares in her “Autobiographical Romance.” The young Fuller dreamed of “horses trampling over her,” or, “as she had just read in her Vergil, of being among trees that dripped with blood, where she walked and walked and could not get out, while the blood became a pool and plashed over her feet and rose higher and higher, until soon she dreamed it would reach her lips.” I would also point to Fuller’s erotic poetry and other expressions of eroticism, to men and to women; in addition to their vulnerability, they add subtle complexity to her thoughts on gender and gender fluidity elsewhere in the volume.
Her poetry is equally revelatory, because frequently it evokes feelings that either she could not or would not express in prose. For example, in her “Journal Fragments” (c. 1840, 1844), after composing “Virgin Mother, Mary mild!” she refuses to interpret the meaning of her verse lines, even to herself. “God, thou knowest what I mean,” she confides. “Lead me through the labyrinth till I face the monster whose presence I feel in the secret depths. May I neither slay nor be slain, but return to the light an instructed being, able to meet this solemn Future.”
There is also a particular poem in her “Manuscript Tracing Journal” (1844) that breaks my heart called “On the boundless plain careering.” It’s about the capture and branding of a wild horse who is separated and ultimately isolated from his companions. Fuller makes the horse a tragic figure with whom you can identify on multiple levels. In the poem’s second half she likens the horse’s situation to women, who in marriage are metaphorically branded and imprisoned. It’s an extraordinarily moving verse feminism, as well as a sympathetic understanding of injustice and inequity.
LOA: Fuller’s influence persists in a number of organizations that bear her name. Could you share a few of the groups preserving her legacy?
BB: One recent development I’d like to give a shout out to is the Fuller Project, an organization of journalists reporting on women’s stories globally. Named after Fuller and founded in 2015, this group writes remarkable stories exposing injustice, attacks on reproductive rights, terrible working conditions. Fuller thought about the connection between theory and action, and that is how this group thinks as well.
MM: I’d also mention the Margaret Fuller Society, which all three of us have been involved with. The organization started in the early 1990s and today is a very broadly based group of scholars, writers and artists, and just plain fans from all over the world.
NAB: The Fuller Society’s newsletter, Conversations, is much more than a newsletter. I think Library of America readers would enjoy it very much.
BB: Another fitting legacy is the East Cambridge house that Fuller lived in as a child. It was turned into a settlement house about one hundred years ago, during the Jane Addams era, and now is called the Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House. It’s still serving the community, including immigrants and other vulnerable groups; for example, they have just announced that they will be building “affordable homeownership units” on their parking lot.
MM: Lastly, we’d like to acknowledge a number of scholars whose work we built on for this edition. When the Library of America began, Robert Hudspeth, who was then working on an edition of Fuller’s letters, was asked to edit an LOA volume of her writings. He ultimately demurred so he could finish what became a six-volume compendium of Fuller’s correspondence. Not just those letters, but also the work of Joel Myerson, Charles Capper, Jeffrey Steele, Larry J. Reynolds, Bell Gale Chevigny, Phyllis Cole, Judith Mattson Bean, and Susan Belasco Smith was invaluable. We could not have done this volume without their foundational scholarship.
The Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House in Cambridge, MA (margaretfullerhouse.org)
Brigitte Bailey is Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of American Travel Literature, Gendered Aesthetics, and the Italian Tour, 1824–1862, co-editor of Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain, and Margaret Fuller and Her Circles. She is former president of the Margaret Fuller Society.
Dr. Noelle A. Baker, an independent scholar, is editor of Stanton in Her Own Time and co-editor of The Almanacks of Mary Moody Emerson: A Scholarly Digital Edition. She is editor in chief of the open-access, peer-reviewed journal Scholarly Editing and has served on the advisory board of the Margaret Fuller Transnational Archive and as an officer of the Margaret Fuller Society.
Megan Marshall is the Charles Wesley Emerson Professor at Emerson College. She is the author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Biography; The Peabody Sisters, winner of the Francis Parkman Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart. She is a past president of the Society of American Historians and has served on the board of the Margaret Fuller Society.
