The lives of Margaret Fuller : [a biography] /

Fuller (1810-50) was a child prodigy, social misfit, Transcendentalist, teacher, and writer. Her society, early 19th-century New England, was a hothouse for idealists. Matteson (English, John Jay College of Criminal Justice) traces Fuller's development as social forces impinged on her. He describes Fuller's early years of homeschooling by her father and subsequent studies (beginning at age 14) focusing on Goethe. Fuller became a part of Ralph Waldo Emerson's social orbit, and he convinced her to edit The Dial, which promoted experimental writing. After two years of unpaid labor she left that publication and, at Horace Greeley's invitation, moved to New York City to become culture critic of Greeley's Tribune. In that role she became aware of women's suffering in penitentiaries, almshouses, and asylums, and recommended that such public institutions provide better sanitation and offer education. Fuller went on to great accomplishments as a feminist and educator; she died in a shipwreck off New York at the age of 40. Drawing extensively on primary resources and Fuller's letters, Matteson frames his discussion of the facts of Fuller's life (which he deeply researched) within contemporaneous issues, and does not focus on the pathos of Fuller's death. Clearly written and persuasive, the book includes extensive notes. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. S. A. Parker emerita, Hiram College

A biography of Margaret Fuller: feminist, writer, editor, traveler. MARGARET FULLER, a woman of great talent and promise, had the misfortune to be born in Massachusetts in 1810, at a time and place in which the characteristics of what historians have termed "true womanhood" were becoming ever more rigidly defined. Well brought-up women like herself were to be cultured, pious, submissive and genteel. Fuller, by contrast, was assertive and freethinking. She was also - and to some extent, still is - a difficult person to like. Arrogant, condescending and vain, Fuller was (as she knew altogether too well) the best-educated American woman of her time. In "The "Lives of Margaret Fuller," John Matteson tells us that Ralph Waldo Emerson thought she exhibited "an overweening sense of power, and slight esteem of others"; Nathaniel Hawthorne found her, as Matteson puts it, "exquisitely irritating"; and Edgar Allan Poe portrayed her acidly. Habituated to deference from others, she was unaccustomed to dealing with people on an equal footing, and she bristled when she did not receive the respect she thought was her due. In youth, she had difficulty making friends among her peers; Matteson details a painful episode when she gave a party and few invitees chose to attend. In adulthood, though, she finally developed a coterie of faithful male and female associates with whom she exchanged copious letters and frequent visits. Matteson, the author of "Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father," explains that intensive home schooling by her lawyer (and later congressman) father, ambitious for the success of his eldest child, meant that she had scant interactions with those of her own age until she was in her teens and had advanced far beyond them in learning. Appropriately enough the first woman given access to the Harvard College Library, Fuller initially found employment as a teacher of those not much younger than herself. Matteson comments that she found the role of teacher and mentor the most congenial throughout her life. Although Fuller is known today primarily as a transcendentalist, she only transiently aligned herself with philosophers like Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Bronson Alcott. She found the male transcendentalists attractive, Matteson observes, because they were "among the few important thinkers of the moment who were willing to see past the facade of gender." Only they offered a genderless vision of virtue and worth to someone trapped in a female body, and a frail one at that, for Fuller suffered from severe headaches - surely migraines - for most of her life. Before her father's sudden death when she was 25, Sarah Margaret (as she was formally named and known to her family) was largely shielded from financial worries. Afterward, she was subjected to the stinginess and whims of her uncle, her father's executor, at the same time that she had become responsible for supporting her mother and several younger siblings, including more than one hapless brother. In New England, teaching, writing and leading her famed "conversations" (for which she was paid by attendees) all brought in some money, but seemingly never enough. Serving as the first editor of The Dial, the transcendentalist quarterly, should have earned her a more regular income. But although the journal was a success intellectually, it was a financial disaster, and she never received any compensation for her efforts. After she ended her association with the journal, Horace Greeley - who admired and had reprinted some of her essays from The Dial - recruited her to work as the first full-time female employee of his New-York Tribune. Matteson, a proud New Yorker himself, sees Fuller's move to the "irresistibly enticing and faintly horrifying" Manhattan of late 1844 as life-changing. Her gaze, hitherto focused on the self, widened to include political and social concerns; she soon produced reports on local poorhouses, insane asylums and jails. Offered the opportunity to travel to Europe with friends in 1846, she became America's first full-time foreign correspondent. In England, she met William Wordsworth; in France, she became friends with George Sand. THEN, in Italy, she fell in love with the country and with an Italian, her eventual husband, the Marchese Giovanni Ossoli, nearly 11 years her junior. They initiated a sexual relationship and apparently were secretly wed in April 1848, when she was already five months pregnant. No record of the marriage survives, but some indirect evidence suggests that a formal ceremony did take place. Ossoli's family, on which he was financially dependent, would have opposed his marrying a foreign Protestant, and Matteson speculates that had she not become pregnant they would have continued as unmarried lovers. As it was, she concealed the marriage, pregnancy and birth of their son, Angelo, from her family and American friends until August 1849. Like Ossoli, a militiaman, Fuller was caught up in the excitement, danger and ultimate failure of the violent Roman revolution of 1848-49. Fleeing the conquered city, the Ossolis initially took refuge in Florence and then decided to sail to the United States. But they and their toddler son died in a shipwreck off Fire Island in July 1850, doomed by an incompetent navigator, an unseasonable hurricane and indifferent local residents. Lost with them was the sole manuscript of her history of the Roman revolution. In the title of his well-written book, Matteson refers to the "lives" of Margaret Fuller because, he explains, she continually reinvented herself over the course of her lifetime. In stressing her "changeability," her "protean character," along with the need of a biographer to "resist the temptation to seize a particular moment" in her life as definitive, he implies that the earlier scholars, whose work he acknowledges and praises, nevertheless fell into exactly that trap. His chapter titles reveal the successive, overlapping lives he has identified: "prodigy," "misfit" and so on, finally to "revolutionary" and "victim." In the epilogue, "Margaret-Ghost," he considers her image in the aftermath of her death and laments the destruction and mutilation of her papers by her first memorialists, her friends Emerson, William Henry Channing and James Freeman Clarke, as constituting "vandalism" that has "permanently disfigured" her and denied subsequent biographers access to the full range of her writings. Fuller's intense early interest in herself is matched by Matteson's; readers in search of information about her "times" should look elsewhere, for until she reaches Rome he establishes context only through occasional brief asides. His interest includes her sex life: he describes both failed relationships with men in the United States and loving relationships with several women, leading him to suggest that she may have been bisexual. Like many others, Matteson lauds Fuller for her authorship of "Woman in the Nineteenth Century" (1845), a stirring early treatise on women's rights. Still, although he regards it as perhaps the key part of her legacy to Americans today, he strangely devotes fewer pages to discussing it than to her "melancholy" and little-known travel book, "Summer on the Lakes" (1844). John Matteson likes and admires Margaret Fuller. His readers too will admire her spirit, intellect and courage, and they will appreciate her pioneering contributions to women's theoretical and practical advancement. Whether he will have also convinced them to like her is another matter. In New England, Margaret Fuller was friends with Emerson, and in France with George Sand. Mary Beth Norton's most recent book is "Separated by Their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World."

Margaret Fuller, associate of Emerson, Hawthorne, and the other Concord intellectuals and most famous for her Woman in the Nineteenth Century as well as for her tragic death, was a determined and brilliant woman who struggled to find her place in the 19th-century world. In this extensive biography, Pulitzer Prize winner Matteson (English, John Jay Coll. of Criminal Justice, CUNY; Eden's Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father) not only gives the reader a clearer understanding of Fuller, but also draws a fairly complete picture of her environment and time. Among the many Fuller biographies, this work distinguishes itself by accomplishing the difficult task of making the subject come to life. Through Matteson's easy narrative style and presentation of Fuller "as a series of identities," readers can begin to understand her drive and her flaws. VERDICT The work is well written, easily accessible, and entertaining. Prior knowledge of Fuller is not necessary to enjoy it. A great read for anyone interested in extraordinary women in our literary and women's history. [See Prepub Alert, 7/11/11.]-Paolina Taglienti, Everest Coll.-Henderson, Las Vegas (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.