Editor(s)
Season

Writer, editor, journalist, educator, feminist, conversationalist, and reformer Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) was one of the leading intellectuals of nineteenth-century America as well as a prominent member of Concord literary circles. Yet the challenging spirit behind her intellectual confidence and mesmerizing energy led to the invention of an unbalanced legacy that denied her a place among the canonical Concord writers. This collection of first-hand reminiscences by those who knew Fuller personally rescues her from these confusions and provides a clearer identity for this misrepresented personality.

The forty-one remembrances from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, Harriet Martineau, Henry James, and twenty-four others chart Fuller’s expanding influence from schooldays in Boston, meetings at the Transcendental Club, teaching in Providence and Boston, work on the New York Tribune, publications and conversations, travels in the British Isles, and life and love in Italy before her tragic early death. Joel Myerson’s perceptive introduction assesses the pre- and postmortem building of Fuller’s reputation as well as her relationship to the prominent Transcendentalists, reformers, literati, and other personalities of her time, and his headnotes to each selection present valuable connecting contexts.

The woman who admitted that “at nineteen she was the most intolerable girl that ever took a seat in a drawing-room,” whose Woman in the Nineteenth Century is considered the first major book-length feminist call to action in America, never conformed to nineteenth-century expectations of self-effacing womanhood. The fascinating contradictions revealed by these narratives create a lively, lifelike biography of Fuller’s “rare gifts and solid acquirements . . . and unfailing intellectual sympathy.”

"A marvelous collection of descriptions, criticisms, adulations, and analyses of Fuller by her American and British contemporaries. Myerson gathers a range of manuscript and published sources to bring back to life the conversation around Fuller as a provocative cultural force. The voices of her friends, family, colleagues, critics, and students—of Emerson, Caroline Dall, Martineau, Greeley, Carlyle, Emelyn Story, and Richard Fuller—are vivid and immerse the reader in the period's language and aspirations. Fuller valued dialogue as a process of discovery; the conversation resurrected here engages readers in the process of understanding one of the major public intellectuals of the nineteenth century."—Brigitte Bailey, University of New Hampshire, president, Margaret Fuller Society

"Fuller in Her Own Time brings together recollections by family members, friends, and fellow writers about Fuller's life and times. Hard-to-find contemporary accounts provide insights into Fuller's years as a schoolgirl, teacher, editor, author, and journalist in the U.S. and Europe. Myerson's volume is an invaluable collection of primary sources for students and scholars interested in the life of one of the most important women of the nineteenth century."—Susan Belasco, editor, Margaret Fuller's Summer on the Lakes in 1843, and coeditor, "These Sad but Glorious Days": Dispatches from Europe, 1846—1850 by Margaret Fuller

Paperback

ISBN-13
9781587296918
Retail price
$27.95
Sale end date

eBook, 120 day

ISBN-13
9781587297465
Retail price
$10.00

eBook, Perpetual

ISBN-13
9781587297465
Retail price
$27.95

Publication Details

Publication Details

Publication Date
04/25/2010
Pages, art, trim size
258 pages, 9 photos, 6 x 9 inches
Edition
1st