Margaret Fuller's Illegibilities: Afterlives of an Unreadable, Unrecoverable Manuscript

Abstract:What can we learn about a manuscript that was probably lost at sea? How can such an elusive text help us to historicize transatlantic reading practices? In this paper, I trace the reception of a book we famously cannot read or recover: Margaret Fuller's history of the Italian Revolution. In July 1850, Fuller drowned with her husband and son when the Elizabeth wrecked within sight of Fire Island, New York; she was returning to the United States after traveling as an international correspondent for the NYDT. Like her body, her book never surfaced. While many believe the manuscript drowned or was looted by pirates, many others believe it never existed, that Fuller never finished or even started writing it. Literary surmising about Fuller's manuscript survives in wide-ranging archives, which I study as interconnected critical responses: powerful interpretations of Fuller's historical sensibilities as a revolutionary journalist-activist. Fuller's manuscript persists, then, in literary histories that are transatlantic in the most real sense of the word.