Educational Media Reviews Online

A 19th century woman of great ambition, feminist, journalist and editor Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) exemplifies an ardent intellectual at a time when women were relegated to domestic duties and childbearing. She recognized her “manifold nature” at a relatively young age and expressed it through 6 volumes of letters, her editorship of one of the first American literary journals, The Dial, and her sparkling intellectual conversations with transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Bronson Alcott, among others. Her claim—“I am determined on distinction”—is here chronicled by a variety of Fuller scholars, including Megan Marshall (author, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life), Joan Von Mehren (author, Minerva and the Muse), Peter McFarland and Joel Myerson (University of the South). This work succeeds more as an overview than as an in-depth consideration since it provides much of her celebrated public life but very little information regarding her personal views. For example, she married relatively late in life after a long career as a public intellectual; this moment passes without real comment. Nor is there any analysis of her emerging consciousness regarding social justice, women’s suffrage or abolition. Furthermore, any negativity regarding her role in the Italian Unification Movement (1847-49) or the cultural shock at her out-of-wedlock child barely elicits more than a passing observation. As such, this is a general introduction to the topic that is more suited to general American 19th historical studies than it is to women’s studies or the history of Transcendentalism.