Margaret Fuller by Megan Marshall -- Prologue

Ma

rga

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Fu

ller

m e g a n m a r s h a l l

A New AmericAN

Life

Author of the peabody sisters

Jacket design by Kimberly g lyder

Jacket photograph © Susan Fox / t revillion Images

a uthor photograph © e ric a ntoniou

HougHtoN miffLiN HArcourt

www.hmhbooks.com

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M a r g a r e t

F u l l e r

m e g a n m a r s h a l l

A New AmericAN Life

“Megan Marshall’s brilliant Margaret Fuller brings us as close as we are ever likely to get to this astonishing creature. She rushes out at us from her nineteenth

century, always several steps ahead, inspiring, heartbreaking, magnificent.” —Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Betraying Spinoza

“Megan Marshall gives new meaning to close reading—from words on a page she conjures a fantastically rich inner life, a meld of body, mind, and soul. Drawing on

the letters and diaries of Margaret Fuller and her circle, she has brought us a brave, visionary, sensual, tough-minded intellectual, a ‘first woman’ who was unique yet stood

for all women. A masterful achievement by a great American writer and scholar.” —Evan Thomas, author of Ike’s Bluff

“Megan Marshall’s Margaret Fuller: A New American Life is the best single volume ever written on Fuller. Carefully researched and beautifully composed, the book brings

Fuller back to life in all her intellectual vivacity and emotional intensity. a masterpiece of empathetic biography, this is the book Fuller herself

would have wanted. You will not be able to put it down.”—Robert D. Richardson, author of Emerson: The Mind on Fire

Praise for the peabody sisters: three women who ignited american romanticism

“[a ] stunning work of biography and intellectual history. Deftly weaving material from the letters and journals of all three sisters, Ms. Marshall . . .

performs the intellectual equivalent of a triple axel.”–William Grimes, New York Times

“a n intimate portrait of three remarkable sisters . . . Marshall’s tour de force is impossible to put down.”

—Drew Gilpin Faust, author of This Republic of Suffering

The award-winning author of The Peabody Sisters takes a fresh look at the life of a great American heroine—Thoreau’s

first editor, Emerson’s close friend, first female war correspondent, passionate advocate of personal liberation.

From an early age, Margaret

Fuller provoked and dazzled New e ngland’s

intellectual elite. Her famous Conversations

changed women’s sense of how they could think

and live; her editorship of the t ranscendental-

ist literary journal The Dial shaped a merican

r omanticism. Now, Megan Marshall, whose

acclaimed The Peabody Sisters “discovered”

three fascinating women, has done it again:

no biography of Fuller has made her ideas

so alive or her life so moving.

Marshall tells the story of how Fuller, tired of

Boston, accepted Horace g reeley’s offer to be

the New-York Tribune’s front-page columnist.

t he move unleashed a crusading concern for

the urban poor and the plight of prostitutes,

and a late-in-life hunger for passionate experi-

ence. In Italy as a foreign correspondent,

Fuller took a secret lover, a young officer in

the r oman g uard; she wrote dispatches on

the brutal 1849 Siege of r ome; and she gave

birth to a son.

Yet, when all three died in a shipwreck off Fire

Island shortly after Fuller’s fortieth birthday,

the sense and passion of her life’s work were

eclipsed by tragedy and scandal. Marshall’s

inspired account brings an a merican heroine

back to indelible life.

0313

megAN mArsHALL is the author of The Peabody

Sisters, which won the Francis Parkman Prize,

the Mark l ynton History Prize, and the

Massachusetts Book a ward in nonfiction

and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in

biography and memoir. Her essays and reviews

have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York

Times Book Review, the Atlantic, and Slate.

a recipient of g uggenheim and Ne H fellow-

ships, Marshall teaches narrative nonfiction

and the art of archival research in the MFa

program at e merson College. For more, visit

www.meganmarshallauthor.com.

$30.00higher in canada

$30.00isbn 978-0-547-19560-5

1057941

higher in canada

Marshall-MargaretFuller_mech.indd 1 1/2/13 2:06 PM

H o u g h t o n M i f f l i n H a r c o u r tboston ne w york

2013

M A rgA r et F u l l e r

• A N e w A m e r i c a n L i f e •

Megan Marshall

o

Marshall_MARGARET FULLER_F.indd 3 1/7/13 11:44 AM

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

l ibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataMarshall, 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 2013818'.309 — dc23

[B 2012042179

Book design by Melissa l otfy

Printed in the united States of Americadoc 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Endpapers: Houghton library, Harvard university, MS Am 1086 box 4, rome Diaries.


list of Illustrations xi

Prologue xv

Pa rt I : Yo u t h

1. three letters 5

2. ellen Kilshaw 10

3. theme: “Possunt quia posse videntur” 20

4. Mariana 28

Pa r t I I : C a M Br I D g e

5. the Young lady’s Friends 39

6. elective Affinities 51

Pa r t I I I : g ro t o n a n D P r ov I De n C e

7. “My heart has no proper home” 71

8. “returned into life” 89

9. “Bringing my opinions to the test” 105

Pa r t I v : C o n C or D , Bo St o n , ja M a IC a Pl a I n

10. “What were we born to do?” 127

11. “the gospel of transcendentalism” 142

12. Communities and Covenants 163

13. “the newest new world” 202

Pa rt v : n e W Yo r k

14. “I stand in the sunny noon of life” 223

15. “Flying on the paper wings of every day” 235

16. “A human secret, like my own” 244

CoNteNtS


x • Contents

Pa rt v I : e u ro Pe

17. lost on Ben lomond 269

18. “rome has grown up in my soul” 282

19. “A being born wholly of my being” 315

Pa rt v I I : ho M e Wa r D

20. “I have lived in a much more full and true way” 353

21. “No favorable wind” 369

epilogue: “After so dear a storm” 379

Acknowledgments 393

Notes 397

Index 451


th e a rc h i vi s t p l ac e d t h e s l i m vo lu m e , an o r d i na ry 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 sur-vived the wreck of the e lizabeth 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 revo-lution 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 e lizabeth. 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 Mar-garet 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

Prologue


xvi • Prologue

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, Marga-ret 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 Ca-pri 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 Hor-ace greeley’s n ew-York t ribune, 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 cir-cular 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 internation-ally 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 conse-quences 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


Prologue • xvii

to purer air” — in death. Margaret’s own legacy had been clouded by the same prurient attention, often leading to condemnation, always distract-ing 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 originat-ing 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 charac-ter in fiction. Margaret Fuller’s haunting allegories personifying flow-ers 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 mid-flight disappearance of Amelia earhart nearly one hundred years later. Although she had titled her most influential book Woman in the n ine-teenth 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 sister-hood 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 Full-er’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 interpreta-tion of woman’s rights, than anything she wrote.” Her writing was elo-quent, assured, and uncannily prescient. But her writing also confirmed


xviii • Prologue

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 im-portant correspondences with many of the significant thinkers and poli-ticians 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 inspi-ration 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 Marga-ret’s childhood was urban, following a national trend: the population of the united States tripled during Margaret’s lifetime, transforming Amer-ican 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 pop-ulation 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 useful-ness outside the home and who readily joined the political life of the na-


Prologue • xix

tion 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 trivi-alized as sentimental, and her interests were as far-ranging as the country itself, where, as she wrote in a farewell column for the t ribune 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 pre-dicted, even more members of her “expansive fellowship”: radical think-ers, 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 countless other seekers of inspira-tion and new theaters of action abroad.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, a friend of Margaret Fuller’s in Concord who fol-lowed her path to the Continent several years after her death, undertook an experiment in fictional form when he put aside writing stories in fa-vor 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 t he h ouse of the Seven g ables, “he wishes to claim a cer-tain 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 fi-delity” 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.”


xx • Prologue

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 “lov-ers” 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. Margaret Fuller maintained that all human beings are capable of great accomplishment, that “genius” would be “common as light, if men trusted their higher selves.” Still, she was always mindful of her own ex-traordinary capabilities. “From a very early age I have felt that I was not born to the common womanly lot,” Margaret wrote to a friend as her thirtieth birthday approached. this awareness was a source of frequent inner turmoil as she strove to realize her talents in an era unfriendly to openly ambitious women. Yet she achieved almost inconceivable success, with remarkable poise. After talking her way into the library at Harvard to complete research on her first book, Margaret did not allow the gawk-ing undergraduates, who had never before seen a woman at work in their midst, to break her concentration. A few years later she occupied a desk in another all-male setting, the newsroom at Horace greeley’s n ew-York t ribune, where she turned out editorials and cultural commentary aimed at shaping the opinions of her fifty thousand readers on subjects from literature and music to Negro voting rights and prison reform. In rome, offering her views in a t ribune column on the u.S. government’s need to appoint an ambassador to the new roman republic, Margaret conjectured, “Another century, and I might ask to be made Ambassador myself.” But in this case, she was forced to admit, “woman’s day has not come yet.” In the twenty-first century, woman’s day may almost have arrived. American women vote and hold high office as elected representatives, judges, diplomats, even secretaries of state, if not as president. Yet Mar-garet Fuller’s journalistic descendants still risk their lives, not just be-


Prologue • xxi

cause they work in dangerous places, but because they are female, objects of scorn and worse, in many parts of the world, for daring to serve in the public arena. What was it like to be such a woman — the only such woman, the first female war correspondent — a half-century after Amer-ica’s own revolution? I have written Margaret Fuller’s story from the inside, using the most direct evidence — her words, and those of her family and friends, re-corded in the moment, preserved in archives, and in many cases carefully annotated and published by scholars of the period. A close reading of this now well-established manuscript record yielded many perceptions that I hope will strike readers familiar with Margaret Fuller’s life as fresh and true. I have also relied on a number of previously unknown documents that emerged during my years of research on the Peabody sisters and later as I tracked my current subject in archives across the country: two newly discovered letters by Margaret Fuller, a record in Mary Peabody’s hand of Margaret Fuller’s first series of Conversations for women held in Boston in 1839, the Peabody sisters’ correspondence during the months following the wreck of the elizabeth, and a letter written by ralph Waldo emerson to the Collector of the Port of New York, itemizing the trunks and valuables lost in the fatal storm. “the scrolls of the past burn my fingers,” Margaret Fuller wrote to her great friend ralph Waldo emerson concerning some particularly painful letters the two had exchanged; “they have not yet passed into literature.” So impassioned are her words, they burn our fingers yet, two centuries later. Margaret Fuller: a new american life is my attempt to transport those letters into literature, to give her magnificent life “a little space,” as she asked from emerson, so that “the sympathetic hues would show again before the fire, renovated and lively.” As for Margaret herself — if she reached a heaven, we may hope it is like the one she once imagined, “empowering me to incessant acts of vigorous beauty.”


Margaret Fuller, engraving by Henry Bryan Hall Jr.


Margaret Fuller by Megan Marshall -- Prologue

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