Margaret Fuller: A New American Life
by Megan Marshall
Summary
Megan Marshall follows Margaret Fuller from a childhood shaped entirely by her father, who taught her Latin and the classics on a schedule usually reserved for boys, into an adulthood that made her, by her own contemporaries' account, the best read person in New England regardless of sex. The book follows Fuller into the middle of American Transcendentalism, editing The Dial for Ralph Waldo Emerson's circle from 1840 to 1842 for a promised salary she never actually collected, and then into the 1845 publication of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, an argument for women's education, paid work and political voice that reads today as the first major feminist work published in the United States.
Marshall follows Fuller into journalism, where the New York Tribune made her its literary critic in 1844 and, by 1846, its first female editor, publishing more than two hundred fifty columns on literature, art, reform and slavery before the paper sent her to Europe as its first female foreign correspondent. The book gives real space to her final years in Italy, where she partnered with the Italian nobleman Giovanni Ossoli, bore their son Angelino in 1848, and volunteered in hospitals during Mazzini's Roman Republic uprising in 1849, before the family drowned together in a shipwreck off Fire Island in July 1850, a wreck that also destroyed the manuscript history of the revolution she had been carrying home.
Marshall writes to reverse a genuine historical erasure, restoring a woman she has said modern readers no longer recognized by name, and reading the book means following a biographer who spent years working to give Fuller back the stature Emerson and Thoreau kept and she lost. It suits a reader curious how a woman this accomplished, this early, could fall out of the American canon almost entirely within a generation of her own death.
Historical Context & Significance
Margaret Fuller: A New American Life won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for Megan Marshall, who had already spent nearly two decades on her first book, The Peabody Sisters, a Pulitzer finalist in 2006 that won the Francis Parkman Prize and the Massachusetts Book Award.
Marshall has built her career specifically around recovering nineteenth century women whose real influence outran their later reputations, and the Fuller biography stands as the fullest modern case for a writer who, in Marshall's own words, was a shock to discover so thoroughly forgotten. Readers who know Fuller mainly as an Emerson footnote or a name in women's history surveys have Marshall's biography largely to thank for a fuller, more specific account of what she actually did. That year's finalists were Leo Damrosch's Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World and Jonathan Sperber's Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life.