Margaret Fuller Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  List of Illustrations

  Margaret Fuller, engraving

  Prologue

  I. YOUTH

  Three Letters

  Ellen Kilshaw

  Theme: “Possunt quia posse videntur”

  Mariana

  II. CAMBRIDGE

  The Young Lady’s Friends

  Elective Affinities

  III. GROTON AND PROVIDENCE

  “My heart has no proper home”

  “Returned into life”

  “Bringing my opinions to the test”

  IV. CONCORD, BOSTON, JAMAICA PLAIN

  “What were we born to do?”

  “The gospel of Transcendentalism”

  Communities and Covenants

  “The newest new world”

  V. NEW YORK

  “I stand in the sunny noon of life”

  “Flying on the paper wings of every day”

  “A human secret, like my own”

  VI. EUROPE

  Lost on Ben Lomond

  “Rome has grown up in my soul”

  “A being born wholly of my being”

  VII. HOMEWARD

  “I have lived in a much more full and true way”

  “No favorable wind”

  Epilogue: “After so dear a storm”

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Sample Chapter from THE PEABODY SISTERS

  Buy the Book

  About the Author

  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

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  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

  eISBN 978-0-547-52362-0

  v2.0313

  In memory of—

  E.S.

  E.S.M.

  &

  E.W.M.M.

  Where I make an impression it must be by being most myself.

  —Margaret Fuller to her editor John Wiley, 1846

  List of Illustrations

  FRONTISPIECE ([>])

  Margaret Fuller, engraving by Henry Bryan Hall Jr. Graphics File, Prints & Drawings, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

  PART I ([>])

  Timothy Fuller, portrait by Rufus Porter. Fruitlands Museum, Harvard, Mass., F.1992.6.

  Margarett Crane Fuller, daguerreotype, c. 1840s. Courtesy of Frances Fuller Soto.

  “The Old Hovey Tavern, Cambridgeport, Which Was Burned June 12th 1828,” lithograph, c. 1820s. Boston Athenaeum, Prints and Photographs Dept., B B64C1 Hot.h.(no.1).

  PART II ([>])

  Margaret Fuller, sketch by James Freeman Clarke. Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1569.3 (11).

  James Freeman Clarke, sketch by his sister, Sarah Freeman Clarke. Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am 1569.3 (10).

  “Perspective View of the Seat of the Hon. Francis Dana,” watercolor by Jacob Bigelow, 1806, for his Harvard College mathematical thesis. Harvard University Archives, HUC 8782.514 (126).

  PART III ([>])

  Photograph of 108 Pleasant Street, Farmer’s Row, Groton. Courtesy of Groton Historical Society, Groton, Mass.

  The Greene Street School, Providence, lithograph. Courtesy of the Rhode Island Historical Society, RHi X17 371.

  PART IV ([>])

  Caroline Sturgis, portrait. Courtesy of the Sturgis Library, Barnstable, Mass.

  Samuel Gray Ward, salt print photograph. Boston Athenaeum, Prints and Photographs Dept., AA 5.4 Ward.s.(no.1).

  Anna Barker Ward, oil portrait by William Morris Hunt. Private collection.

  Margaret Fuller, photograph, Southworth and Hawes, 1850-55, after a daguerreotype by John Plumbe, 1846. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Edward Southworth Hawes in memory of his father, Josiah Johnson Hawes, 43.1412.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, daguerreotype. Courtesy of Concord Free Public Library, Concord, Mass.

  Ellery Channing, portrait. Courtesy of J. C. Marriner.

  Ellen Kilshaw Fuller, daguerreotype. Courtesy of Frances Fuller Soto.

  PART V ([>])

  “New York City Hall, Park and Environs,” c. 1849, lithograph by John Bachmann. From the collection of the New-York Historical Society.

  PART VI ([>])

  George Sand, sketch, oil on canvas, by Thomas Couture, c. 1848. Courtesy of Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, N.Y.

  Adam Mickiewicz, drawing by Kazimierz Mordasewicz, 1898, after a daguerreotype of 1839 by an unknown artist. Courtesy of Muzeum Literatury Adama Mickiewicza, Warsaw.

  Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, daguerreotype. Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS AM 1086.1.

  PART VII ([>])

  “Tasso’s Oak, Rome,” engraving by J. G. Strutt belonging to Margaret Fuller, inscribed “From the Wreck of the Elizabeth.” Courtesy of Lucilla Fuller Marvel.

  Margaret Fuller, engraving by Henry Bryan Hall Jr.

  Prologue

  THE ARCHIVIST PLACED THE SLIM VOLUME, AN ORDINARY 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 survived the wreck of the Elizabeth 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 revolution 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 Elizabeth.

  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 Margaret 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 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, Margaret 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 Capri 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 Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune, 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 circular 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 internationally 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 consequences 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 to purer air”—in death. Margaret’s own legacy had been clouded by the same prurient attention, often leading to condemnation, always distracting 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 originating 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 character in fiction. Margaret Fuller’s haunting allegories personifying flowers 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 midflight disappearance of Amelia Earhart nearly one hundred years later. Although she had titled her most influential book Woman in the Nineteenth 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 sisterhood 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 Fuller’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 interpretation of woman’s rights, than anything she wrote.” Her writing was eloquent, assured, and uncannily prescient. But her writing also confirmed 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 important correspondences with many of the significant thinkers and politicians 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 inspiration 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 Margaret’s childhood was urban, following a national trend: the population of the United States tripled during Margaret’s lifetime, transforming American 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 population 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 usefulness outside the home and who readily joined the political life of the nation 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 trivialized as sentimental, and her interests were as far-ranging as the country itself, where, as she wrote in a farewell column for the Tribune 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 predicted, even more members of her “expansive fellowship”: radical thinkers, 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 countles
s other seekers of inspiration and new theaters of action abroad.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne, a friend of Margaret Fuller’s in Concord who followed her path to the Continent several years after her death, undertook an experiment in fictional form when he put aside writing stories in favor 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 The House of the Seven Gables, “he wishes to claim a certain 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 fidelity” 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.”

  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 “lovers” 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.