Margaret Fuller: A Woman Who Never Fails to Fascinate

The years leading up to the Civil War were some of the most turbulent and exciting in American history. While heated political debates wracked Congress and reformers sought to address an array of wrongs affecting the nation, American writers had begun to create a national literature. At the heart of this literary renaissance was a woman of extraordinary talent and brilliance: Margaret Fuller. No biographer has paid her greater tribute than Charles Capper. The recent publication of his second volume focusing on her public life confirms the assessment of Fuller’s contemporaries who heralded her as a bold writer, intellect, and literary critic. As abolitionist and women’s rights leader Lucretia Mott observed, Fuller’s literary criticism did “credit to the brain of Woman,” and others acknowledged that her treatise, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, did more to provide a framework and inspiration for the women’s rights movement than any other publication.¹

Fifteen years after volume one appeared, Capper has now completed his exhaustive account of Fuller’s life and writings from 1840 until her tragic death a decade later. His first volume, Margaret Fuller: The Private Years, won a well-deserved Bancroft Prize in 1993. With this second volume, Capper has established his preeminent position as the authority on Fuller. No experience or thought is ignored, no telling comment left unstated, and no essay left without extensive analysis as he reveals the life of this complicated woman. While admiring of Fuller’s talents and her brilliant, bold observations on contemporary writers and her captivating accounts from abroad, Capper balances that admiration by exposing her inconsistencies, yearnings, and insecurities.

The first volume of Capper’s biography covered Fuller’s early years. An “Enlightenment-inspired” educational regimen overseen by her demanding father Timothy cultivated Fuller’s intellectual interests and attention to the life of the mind. For Timothy Fuller, paternal affection translated into high expectations and relentless pressure on Margaret to excel. All too soon, she was applying her own pressure. The family’s residence in the heart of Cambridge’s cultural and intellectual life added to that stimulation. It is little wonder that throughout her life, Fuller suffered from headaches, bouts of depression, and extended periods of poor health. Her father’s unexpected death in 1835 when Fuller was twenty-five proved traumatic but freed her from his oversight and high expectations.

Margaret Fuller: The Public Years begins in 1840 with Fuller’s growing fascination with New England Transcendentalism. She helped launch and then edit that movement’s newspaper, The Dial, collaborating with Ralph Waldo Emerson and other intellectuals and writers. Drawn to Transcendental philosophy, Fuller considered residing at Brook Farm but her pragmatic nature questioned the appeal of country living and the zealousness of its founders, George and Sophia Ripley. For Fuller, conversing with followers and writing literary and social criticism better suited her nature. Fuller developed her skills as a literary critic, using her pen to skewer or celebrate particular writers. For instance, her forty-one-page essay on Goethe was insightful and brilliant, reflecting a larger talent infused with what Capper calls a “critical sophistication almost unique in antebellum criticism” (p. 63).

Her bold critiques created both enemies and friends. Fuller had little use for James Russell Lowell and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, dismissing the latter’s book of poetry as “the thinnest of all Mr. Longfellow’s thin books” and sensing that the public had elevated him well beyond his worth (p. 59). A young Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of her favorites; she admired his quick, bright, creative mind. She befriended Hawthorne and his wife Sophia and later spent time at their Concord home, though like some of Fuller’s acquaintances, she was probably fonder of them than they were of her. Among European female literary giants whom she critiqued, Fuller expressed growing admiration for George Sand and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She edited the Dial for a year and a half until poor...