Margaret Fuller
Poet, essayist, journalist, and Transcendentalist activist Sarah Margaret Fuller was born on May 23, 1810, in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, a neighborhood in Cambridge, to Margarett (née Crane) and Timothy Fuller, a respected member, first of both the Massachusetts State House and Senate, then a Congressman in the House of Representatives. She was the eldest child in the Fuller family and strongly encouraged by her father to excel intellectually. She first attended the Boston Lyceum for the Education of Young Ladies, a school established by Dr. John Park, a former medical doctor and newspaper founder turned educator, in Boston. In 1824, Fuller enrolled at Miss Susan Prescott’s Young Ladies Seminary in Groton, Massachusetts.
In 1835, Timothy Fuller died of cholera, leaving behind eight children. Margaret Fuller, too, nearly died in the same year of a serious illness, thus having her plans to travel to Europe that year placed on hold. Though she, her mother, and her siblings had been transferred to the care of her paternal uncle, Abraham, Fuller decided to financially support herself and her family on her own. In the fall of 1836, she began teaching at the Temple School in Boston led by the Transcendentalist philosopher, teacher, and reformer Bronson Alcott. She remained at the school for a year. Around this time, Fuller began to develop friendships with the Transcendentalists, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose Concord home she visited on his invitation and with whom she would maintain a lively discourse for the rest of her life. She moved to Providence in 1837 and held a teaching position in the city for two years.
In 1839, Fuller, published a translation of Johann Peter Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe (Hilliard, Gray, and Company), edited by George Ripley, but she never completed her passion project: a biography of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Her deepening immersion in the Transcendentalist circle led to friendships with the Peabody sisters, particularly fellow educator Elizabeth, and Fuller’s tenure as the editor of the Transcendentalist magazine The Dial, starting in 1840. She contributed poetry, essays, and criticism to the magazine for two years. Her essay “The Great Lawsuit,” published in July 1843, was an indictment of contemporary marriage. It caught the attention of Horace Greeley who had recently founded the newspaper the New York Tribune. In 1844, he installed Fuller as the fledgling newspaper’s literary critic and editor, though Fuller also penned exposés on the abuse of prisoners and editorials in support of suffrage for African Americans and women. In 1845, she published her best known work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Greeley & McElrath), which contained her writings on these subjects. Some of her friends, including the abolitionist writer Lydia Maria Child and Sophia Peabody, a painter and the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne, met with consternation due to Fuller’s boldness.
In 1846, she departed for Europe. She reported on her travels for the Tribune, thus becoming the first ever female foreign correspondent from the United States. She later collected her writings, which she penned in an epistolary style, in At Home and Abroad; or, Things and Thoughts in America and Europe, first published in 1856 and both edited and initially published by her brother Arthur.
Fuller moved to Italy in 1847 where she met the penniless nobleman Giovanni Angelo, Marchese Ossoli, in Rome. Fuller bore witness to the revolutions that swept Europe in 1848. That summer, she began to chronicle the changes across the continent in a narrative. The following year, she secretly married Ossoli and began publishing work under her married name. The couple fled Rome in July of 1849 after French occupation forces entered the city. They settled briefly in Florence, where Fuller wrote her final dispatch for the Tribune in January 1850 (published in February) and began to make plans to return to the United States, despite the Ossolis’ depleted funds.
With the help of their friend and sometime employer, the American sculptor Joseph Mozier, the Ossolis, including their son Nino, were able to secure passage to the United States on the Elizabeth, which set sail on June 8, 1850. On July 19, the ship hit a sandbar and became wrecked, resulting in eight deaths, including those of Fuller and her family. The manuscript she had been working on to chronicle the revolutions in Europe and, particularly in Italy, was lost at sea.
Two years after her death, with Horace Greeley’s staunch encouragement, the clergymen and writers William Henry Channing and James Freeman Clarke, along with Emerson, compiled letters and other writings by Fuller to publish The Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Phillips, Samson and Company, 1852).
