The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography

The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography. By John Matteson. New York: W. Norton, 2012. 510 pages. Illustrations. $32.95 (hardcover).This thoroughly researched and well-written new biography of Margaret Fuller (18101850) takes a thematic rather than a strictly chronological approach, describing and assessing, chapter by chapter, the roles, concerns, and stances that characterized the multifaceted life of a fascinatingly complex woman. Fuller was, in her day, the best-read woman in the U.S. and perhaps the most outspoken and influential. The book ambitiously invites readers "to observe Fuller's time on earth...as a succession of lives, each one building on those previously lived, each one preserving the markings and conditionings of its predecessors, and each one lived in anticipation of further incarnations' ' (xv).One of the keys to Fuller's life (or "lives," as Matteson puts it) was the rigorous upbringing to which she was subjected from an early age, serving as an experimental subject in her father's attempt to overturn sexual stereotypes about child rearing. Margaret's early home-schooling in Cambridge, Massachusetts, consisted of a rigorous classical education in Greek, Latin, French, English literature, philosophy, mathematics, and natural science. Her daily diet of reading (and exacting oral examinations) would have exhausted a precocious adult. The result of this upbringing was a child prodigy destined eventually to hold her own with the leading male intellectuals of her era, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, but the toll on her personal life was devastating. Her life-long pursuit of ever-higher levels of intellectual excellence wore down her physical health. The demands she placed on other people made it difficult for her to find love or to be comfortably accepted in society. She was exceptional, and often alone.Fuller's scholarly relationship with Emerson and others led to her editorship of The Dial, a periodical (1840-1844) associated with the Transcendentalist movement in Concord, Massachusetts. Around the same time, she hosted a series of "conversations" for women, who paid for the privilege of attending. These seminars were intended to expose women to a variety of subjects, encouraging them to think on their own and to express well-reasoned opinions. She also taught classes at Bronson Alcott's Temple School in Boston. Eventually tiring of what she perceived to be Bostonian provincialism, Fuller moved to New York to write for Horace Greeley's NewYork Tribune as the paper's first female employee. She authored the first feminist book in America, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), based on articles first published in The Dial. The book demanded legal equality for women, became a best seller, and made Fuller famous (as well as notorious, because her research included interviews with prostitutes as well as women leading more conventional lives). In 1846, Greeley offered her the opportunity to travel in Europe as his only foreign correspondent.In Italy, an impoverished and uneducated Italian nobleman, Giovanni Ossoli, courted Fuller's attentions, and she fell in love. In Rome, she reported on (and became involved in) the Italian fight for reunification and democracy. When Ossoli was wounded while manning an insurgent barricade, she nursed him back to health. Fuller and Ossoli may or may not have been legally married, although she spoke of him as her husband, took his name, and gave birth to his son. …