From an early age,

megan $30.00
higher in canada

marshall
The award-winning author of The Peabody Sisters takes a
fresh look at the life of a great American heroine—Thoreau’s
first editor, Emerson’s close friend, first female war
Margaret Fuller provoked and dazzled New e ngland’s
Margaret

intellectual elite. Her famous Conversations

Fuller
Margaret
correspondent, passionate advocate of personal liberation.

Fuller
changed women’s sense of how they could think
and live; her editorship of the t ranscendental-
“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 ist literary journal The Dial shaped a merican
century, always several steps ahead, inspiring, heartbreaking, magnificent.” r omanticism. Now, Megan Marshall, whose
—Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Betraying Spinoza acclaimed The Peabody Sisters “discovered”
three fascinating women, has done it again:
“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 no biography of Fuller has made her ideas
megAN mArsHALL is the author of The Peabody
the letters and diaries of Margaret Fuller and her circle, she has brought us a brave, so alive or her life so moving.
Sisters, which won the Francis Parkman Prize,
visionary, sensual, tough-minded intellectual, a ‘first woman’ who was unique yet stood
the Mark l ynton History Prize, and the
for all women. A masterful achievement by a great American writer and scholar.”
Marshall tells the story of how Fuller, tired of
Massachusetts Book a ward in nonfiction —Evan Thomas, author of Ike’s Bluff A New AmericAN Life Boston, accepted Horace g reeley’s offer to be
and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in
“Megan Marshall’s Margaret Fuller: A New American Life is the best single volume ever the New-York Tribune’s front-page columnist.
biography and memoir. Her essays and reviews
written on Fuller. Carefully researched and beautifully composed, the book brings t he move unleashed a crusading concern for
have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York
Fuller back to life in all her intellectual vivacity and emotional intensity.
the urban poor and the plight of prostitutes,
Times Book Review, the Atlantic, and Slate. a masterpiece of empathetic biography, this is the book Fuller herself
would have wanted. You will not be able to put it down.” and a late-in-life hunger for passionate experi-
a recipient of g uggenheim and Ne H fellow-
—Robert D. Richardson, author of Emerson: The Mind on Fire ence. In Italy as a foreign correspondent,
ships, Marshall teaches narrative nonfiction
Fuller took a secret lover, a young officer in
and the art of archival research in the MFa
Praise for the peabody sisters: three women who ignited american romanticism
the r oman g uard; she wrote dispatches on
program at e merson College. For more, visit
“[a ] stunning work of biography and intellectual history. Deftly weaving the brutal 1849 Siege of r ome; and she gave
www.meganmarshallauthor.com.
material from the letters and journals of all three sisters, Ms. Marshall . . . birth to a son.
performs the intellectual equivalent of a triple axel.”
–William Grimes, New York Times
Yet, when all three died in a shipwreck off Fire
“a n intimate portrait of three remarkable sisters . . . Island shortly after Fuller’s fortieth birthday,
Marshall’s tour de force is impossible to put down.” the sense and passion of her life’s work were
Jacket design by Kimberly g lyder —Drew Gilpin Faust, author of This Republic of Suffering
eclipsed by tragedy and scandal. Marshall’s
© h o u g h t o n m if fl in h a r c o u r t p ub l i s h i n g c o m pa n y

Jacket photograph © Susan Fox / t revillion Images

a uthor photograph © e ric a ntoniou A New inspired account brings an a merican heroine
AmericAN back to indelible life.
Life

megan marshall
Author of
$30.00 higher in canada
HougHtoN miffLiN HArcourt isbn 978-0-547-19560-5

www.hmhbooks.com
1057941 the peabody sisters 0313

Marshall-MargaretFuller_mech.indd 1 1/2/13 2:06 PM

 M A rgA r et
Fuller
• A New American Life •

Megan Marshall

H o u g h ton M i f f l i n H a rc o u rt
boston ne w york
2013

Marshall_MARGARET FULLER_F.indd 3 1/7/13 11:44 AM

 Copyright © 2013 by Megan Marshall

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhbooks.com

l ibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Marshall, Megan.
Margaret Fuller : a new American life / Megan Marshall.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-547-19560-5 (hardback)
1. Fuller, Margaret, 1810–1850. 2. Authors, American — 19th century — Biography.
3. Feminists — united States — Biography. I. title.
PS2506.M37 2013
818'.309 — dc23
[B 2012042179

Book design by Melissa l otfy

Printed in the united States of America

doc 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Endpapers: Houghton library, Harvard university,

MS Am 1086 box 4, rome Diaries.

Marshall_MARGARET FULLER_F.indd 4 1/7/13 11:44 AM

 CoNteNtS

list of Illustrations xi
Prologue xv

Pa rt I : Yo u t h
1. three letters 5
2. ellen Kilshaw 10
3. theme: “Possunt quia posse videntur” 20
4. Mariana 28

Pa r t I I: C a M Br I D g e
5. the Young lady’s Friends 39
6. elective Affinities 51

Pa r t I I I: g ro t o n a n D P r ov I D e n C e
7. “My heart has no proper home” 71
8. “returned into life” 89
9. “Bringing my opinions to the test” 105

Pa r t I v : C o n C or D , B o St o n , ja M a IC a P l a I n
10. “What were we born to do?” 127
11. “the gospel of transcendentalism” 142
12. Communities and Covenants 163
13. “the newest new world” 202

Pa rt v : n e W Yo r k
14. “I stand in the sunny noon of life” 223
15. “Flying on the paper wings of every day” 235
16. “A human secret, like my own” 244

Marshall_MARGARET FULLER_F.indd 9 1/7/13 11:44 AM

 x • Contents

Pa rt v I: e u ro P e
17. lost on Ben lomond 269
18. “rome has grown up in my soul” 282
19. “A being born wholly of my being” 315

Pa rt v I I: ho M e Wa r D
20. “I have lived in a much more full and true way” 353
21. “No favorable wind” 369

epilogue: “After so dear a storm” 379

Acknowledgments 393
Notes 397
Index 451

Marshall_MARGARET FULLER_F.indd 10 1/7/13 11:44 AM

 Prologue

t h e a rc h i vi s t p l ac e d t h e s l i m vo lu m e , an o r d i na ry
composition book with mottled green covers, in a protective foam cradle
on the library desk in front of me. When I opened it, I knew I would find
pages filled with a familiar looping script, a forward-slanting hand that
often seemed to rush from one line to the next as if racing to catch up
with the writer’s coursing thoughts.
But this notebook was different from any other I’d seen: it had sur-
vived the wreck of the e lizabeth off Fire Island in July 1850, packed
safely in a trunk that floated to shore, where grieving friends retrieved
the soggy diary and dried it by the fire. the green pasteboard cover had
pulled away from its backing; the pages were warped at the edges in even
ripples. this was Margaret Fuller’s last known journal. Its contents were
all that remained to hint at what she might have written in her famous
lost manuscript on the rise and fall of the 1849 roman republic, the revo-
lution she had barely survived. the manuscript itself — “what is most
valuable to me if I live of any thing” — had been swept away more than
a century and a half ago in a storm of near hurricane force, along with
Margaret, her young Italian husband, and their two-year-old son, all of
them passengers on the ill-fated e lizabeth.
I opened the cover and read what appeared to be a message directed to
me, or to anyone else who might choose to study this singular document.
the words, written on a white index card, had not been penned in Mar-
garet Fuller’s flowing longhand, but rather penciled in a primly vertical
script formed in a decade closer to mine — by a descendant? an earlier
biographer? a library cataloguer? two brief lines carried a judgment on
the volume, and on Margaret herself: “Nothing personal, public events
merely.” the nameless reader, like so many before and since, had been
searching Margaret Fuller’s private papers for clues to the mysteries in
her personal life — Had she really married the Italian marchese she called

Marshall_MARGARET FULLER_F.indd 15 1/7/13 11:44 AM

 xvi • Prologue

her husband? Was their child conceived out of wedlock? — and found the
evidence lacking.
I turned the pages, reading at random. In the early passages, Marga-
ret recalled her arrival at Naples in the spring of 1847 at age thirty-six,
her “first acquaintance with the fig and olive,” and sightseeing in Ca-
pri and Pompeii before traveling overland to rome. Having grown up
a prodigy of classical learning in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Margaret
had long wished to make this journey. Yet perhaps it was for the best that
a reversal in family fortune kept her in New england through her early
thirties. She had made a name for herself among the transcendentalists,
becoming emerson’s friend and thoreau’s editor before moving to New
York City for an eighteen-month stint as front-page columnist for Hor-
ace greeley’s n ew-York t ribune, which led to this belated european tour
in a triumphal role as foreign correspondent, witness to the revolutions
that spread across the Continent beginning in 1848.
Flipping ahead to January 1849, I read of the exiled soldier-politicians
garibaldi and Mazzini greeted in rome as returning heroes and of a cir-
cular posted by the deposed Pope Pius IX, excommunicating any citizen
who had aided in the assassination of his highest deputy the previous
November: “the people received it with jeers, tore it at once from the
walls.” then — “Monstrous are the treacheries of our time”! — French
troops, dispatched to restore the pope to power, had landed just fifty miles
away on the Mediterranean coast, at Civitavecchia. Finally, on April 28:
“rome is barricaded, the foe daily hourly expected.” these vivid entries,
brief as they were, would anchor my narrative of Margaret’s roman
years. Public events “merely”?
How extraordinary it was to find a woman’s private journal filled with
such accounts. Yet the inscriber of the index card had found the contents
disappointing. Would any reader fault a man — especially an internation-
ally known writer and activist, as Margaret Fuller was — for keeping a
journal confined to public events through a springtime of revolution?
Margaret well understood this limited view of women and the conse-
quences for those who overstepped its bounds. She herself had scorned
those who censured her personal heroines, Mary Wollstonecraft and
george Sand, for flouting the institution of marriage; Margaret had been
appalled that critics “will not take off the brand” once it had been “set
upon” these unconventional women, even after they found “their way

Marshall_MARGARET FULLER_F.indd 16 1/7/13 11:44 AM

 Prologue • xvii

to purer air” — in death. Margaret’s own legacy had been clouded by the
same prurient attention, often leading to condemnation, always distract-
ing attention from her achievements.
For a time I believed I must write a biography of Margaret Fuller that
turned away from the intrigues in her private life, that spoke of public
events solely, and that would affirm her eminence as America’s originat-
ing and most consequential theorist of woman’s role in history, culture,
and society. Margaret Fuller was, to borrow a phrase coined by one of her
friends, a “fore-sayer.” No other writer, until Simone de Beauvoir took
up similar themes in the 1940s, had so skillfully critiqued what Margaret
Fuller termed in 1843 “the great radical dualism” of gender. “there is
no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman,” she had written,
anticipating Virginia Woolf ’s explorations of male and female charac-
ter in fiction. Margaret Fuller’s haunting allegories personifying flow-
ers presaged georgia o’Keeffe ’s sensual flower paintings; her untimely
midcareer death set off a persistent public longing to refuse the facts
and grant her a different fate, similar to the reaction following the mid-
flight disappearance of Amelia earhart nearly one hundred years later.
Although she had titled her most influential book Woman in the n ine-
teenth Century, heralding an era in which she expected great advances
for women, Margaret Fuller fit more readily among these heroines of
the twentieth century. She deserved a place in this international sister-
hood whose achievements her own pioneering writings helped to make
possible.
But while I never gave up the aim of representing Margaret Fuller’s
many accomplishments, as I read more of her letters, journals, and works
in print, I began to recognize the personal in the political. Margaret Full-
er’s critique of marriage was formulated during a period of tussling with
the unhappily married ralph Waldo emerson over the nature of their
emotional involvement; her pronouncements on the emerging power
of single women evolved from her own struggle with the role; even
her brave stand for the roman republic could not be separated from
her love affair with one particular roman republican. It was not true,
as she had written of Mary Wollstonecraft, that Margaret Fuller was “a
woman whose existence better proved the need of some new interpreta-
tion of woman’s rights, than anything she wrote.” Her writing was elo-
quent, assured, and uncannily prescient. But her writing also confirmed

Marshall_MARGARET FULLER_F.indd 17 1/7/13 11:44 AM

 xviii • Prologue

my hunch. Margaret Fuller’s published books were hybrids of personal

observation, extracts from letters and diaries, confessional poetry; her
private journals were filled with cultural commentary and reportage on
public events. Margaret did not experience her life as divided into public
and private; rather, she sought “fulness of being.” She maintained im-
portant correspondences with many of the significant thinkers and poli-
ticians of her day — from emerson to Harriet Martineau to the Polish
poet and revolutionary Adam Mickiewicz — but she valued the letters she
received above all for the “history of feeling” they contained. She, like so
many of her comrades, both male and female, valued feeling as an inspi-
ration to action in both the private and public spheres. I would write the
full story — operatic in its emotional pitch, global in its dimensions.

Margaret Fuller’s mind and life were so exceptional that it can be easy to
miss the ways in which she was emblematic of her time, an embodiment
of her era’s “go-ahead” spirit. Her parents grew up in country towns
in Massachusetts, their families eking out a tenuous subsistence in the
early years of the republic; both were drawn to city life, and they met by
chance, crossing in opposite directions on the new West Bridge, the first
to connect Cambridge and Boston. their life together through Marga-
ret’s childhood was urban, following a national trend: the population of
the united States tripled during Margaret’s lifetime, transforming Amer-
ican cities. the advent of railroads and a massive influx of immigrants
from overseas stimulated urban growth.
By the late 1830s and ’40s, when Margaret was a young single woman
living in Providence, Boston, and Cambridge, New england had become
the first region in the country with a shortage of men. the overcrowded
job market and economic volatility that drove her lawyer father back to
farming and her younger brothers to seek employment in the South and
West created this imbalance, leaving one third of Boston’s female pop-
ulation unmarried. little wonder that Margaret toyed for a while with
the notion that only an unmarried woman could “represent the female
world.” Her argument was theoretical: American wives belonged by law
to their husbands and could not act independently. Yet she also spoke for
a surging population of women, many of them single, who sought useful-
ness outside the home and who readily joined the political life of the na-

Marshall_MARGARET FULLER_F.indd 18 1/7/13 11:44 AM

 Prologue • xix

tion by advocating causes from temperance to abolition long before they

gained the right to vote.
Despite her allegiance to women’s rights and her important alliances
with reform-minded women, Margaret Fuller was never a joiner. She
took to heart the example of the French novelist george Sand, whom she
met in Paris, a woman who effectively articulated her ideas through both
conversation and published writing and who chose an independent path
in life. She was impressed by the way Sand “takes rank in society like a
man, for the weight of her thoughts.” In a time when “self-reliance” was
the watchword — one she helped to coin and circulate — Margaret had,
by her own account, a “mind that insisted on utterance.” She too insisted
that her ideas be valued as highly as those of the brilliant men who were
her comrades. She refused to be pigeonholed as a woman writer or trivi-
alized as sentimental, and her interests were as far-ranging as the country
itself, where, as she wrote in a farewell column for the t ribune when she
sailed for europe, “life rushes wide and free.” In england, France, and
Italy, Margaret found, as the stay-at-home ralph Waldo emerson pre-
dicted, even more members of her “expansive fellowship”: radical think-
ers, revolutionaries, and artists of the new age. Yet even in this journey to
the old World she was marking out a new American life — a route traced
in the future by the likes of Henry James, edith Wharton, Mary Cassatt,
John reed, ernest Hemingway, and countless other seekers of inspira-
tion and new theaters of action abroad.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, a friend of Margaret Fuller’s in Concord who fol-

lowed her path to the Continent several years after her death, undertook
an experiment in fictional form when he put aside writing stories in fa-
vor of longer narratives. He preferred to call his books “romances,” not
novels. “When a writer calls his work a romance,” Hawthorne explained
in his preface to t he h ouse of the Seven g ables, “he wishes to claim a cer-
tain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have
felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel.”
the novelist, in Hawthorne ’s terms, aims to achieve “a very minute fi-
delity” to experience, whereas the author of a romance may “bring out
or mellow the lights and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture”
while still maintaining strict allegiance to “the truth of the human heart.”

Marshall_MARGARET FULLER_F.indd 19 1/7/13 11:44 AM

 xx • Prologue

My book is not a work of fiction, but I have kept in mind Hawthorne ’s

notion of the “romance” as a guiding principle in my factual narrative.
or, to borrow from Margaret Fuller herself, “we propose some liberating
measures.” I have brought out lights and deepened shadows, intensifying
focus, for example, on Margaret’s friendships in a circle of young “lov-
ers” who were drawn to the flame of her intelligence during the years of
her closest friendship with emerson, and on her experience as a mother
separated from her infant son during wartime. My account lingers on
such points to render the complexity of her lived experience and to make
full use of the rich documentation of these key episodes. At other times
the narrative takes a more rapid pace to chart the swift trajectory of this
“ardent and onward-looking spirit” whose life spanned only forty years.
Margaret Fuller maintained that all human beings are capable of
great accomplishment, that “genius” would be “common as light, if men
trusted their higher selves.” Still, she was always mindful of her own ex-
traordinary capabilities. “From a very early age I have felt that I was not
born to the common womanly lot,” Margaret wrote to a friend as her
thirtieth birthday approached. this awareness was a source of frequent
inner turmoil as she strove to realize her talents in an era unfriendly to
openly ambitious women. Yet she achieved almost inconceivable success,
with remarkable poise. After talking her way into the library at Harvard
to complete research on her first book, Margaret did not allow the gawk-
ing undergraduates, who had never before seen a woman at work in their
midst, to break her concentration. A few years later she occupied a desk
in another all-male setting, the newsroom at Horace greeley’s n ew-
York t ribune, where she turned out editorials and cultural commentary
aimed at shaping the opinions of her fifty thousand readers on subjects
from literature and music to Negro voting rights and prison reform. In
rome, offering her views in a t ribune column on the u.S. government’s
need to appoint an ambassador to the new roman republic, Margaret
conjectured, “Another century, and I might ask to be made Ambassador
myself.” But in this case, she was forced to admit, “woman’s day has not
come yet.”
In the twenty-first century, woman’s day may almost have arrived.
American women vote and hold high office as elected representatives,
judges, diplomats, even secretaries of state, if not as president. Yet Mar-
garet Fuller’s journalistic descendants still risk their lives, not just be-

Marshall_MARGARET FULLER_F.indd 20 1/7/13 11:44 AM

 Prologue  •  xxi

cause they work in dangerous places, but because they are female, objects
of scorn and worse, in many parts of the world, for daring to serve in
the public arena. What was it like to be such a woman​ — ​the only such
woman, the first female war correspondent​ — ​a half-century after Amer-
ica’s own revolution?
I have written Margaret Fuller’s story from the inside, using the most
direct evidence​ — ​her words, and those of her family and friends, re-
corded in the moment, preserved in archives, and in many cases carefully
annotated and published by scholars of the period. A close reading of this
now well-established manuscript record yielded many perceptions that I
hope will strike readers familiar with Margaret Fuller’s life as fresh and
true. I have also relied on a number of previously unknown documents
that emerged during my years of research on the Peabody sisters and
later as I tracked my current subject in archives across the country: two
newly discovered letters by Margaret Fuller, a record in Mary Peabody’s
hand of Margaret Fuller’s first series of Conversations for women held in
Boston in 1839, the Peabody sisters’ correspondence during the months
following the wreck of the Elizabeth, and a letter written by Ralph Waldo
Emerson to the Collector of the Port of New York, itemizing the trunks
and valuables lost in the fatal storm.
“The scrolls of the past burn my fingers,” Margaret Fuller wrote to her
great friend Ralph Waldo Emerson concerning some particularly painful
letters the two had exchanged; “they have not yet passed into literature.”
So impassioned are her words, they burn our fingers yet, two centuries
later. Margaret Fuller: A New American Life is my attempt to transport
those letters into literature, to give her magnificent life “a little space,”
as she asked from Emerson, so that “the sympathetic hues would show
again before the fire, renovated and lively.” As for Margaret herself​ — ​if
she reached a heaven, we may hope it is like the one she once imagined,
“empowering me to incessant acts of vigorous beauty.”

Marshall_MARGARET FULLER_F.indd 21 1/7/13 11:44 AM

 Margaret Fuller, engraving by Henry Bryan Hall Jr.

Marshall_MARGARET FULLER_F.indd 13 1/7/13 11:44 AM