Fuller in Her Own Time

A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

Joel Myerson, Joel Myerson

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781587297465
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

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."

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• Chronology
• Fuller as a Schoolgirl in 1819–1820
• Journal Comments on Fuller in 1836 and 1838
• Epistolary Comments on Fuller in 1836, 1843, and 1850
• Fuller in Providence in 1837–1838
• Fuller as a Teacher in 1837–1838
• Fuller as a Teacher in 1838
• Fuller as a Teacher in 1838
• Fuller as a Teacher in 1838–1839
• Fuller’s Conversations in 1839 and 1840
• Epistolary and Journal Comments on Fuller in 1839, 1841, and 1842
• Epistolary Comments on Fuller in 1839, 1841, and 1850
• Journal Comments on Fuller in 1840
• Fuller’s Conversations in 1841
• Fuller in New York in 1844–1846
• “The Literati of New York City” (1846)
• Fuller at the Italian School, London, in 1846
• Epistolary Comments on Fuller in 1846 and 1852
• Fuller in Italy in 1847
• Fuller in Rome in 1847–1849
• Fuller in Rome in 1849
• Fuller in Florence in 1850
• Fuller’s Death in 1850
• Epistolary Comments on Fuller in 1850, 1851, and 1852
• Epistolary Comments on Fuller in 1851
• Journal Comments on Fuller in 1851 and 1852
• From Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852)
• From Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852)
• From Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852)
• From Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852)
• Epistolary Comments on Fuller in 1852
• Epistolary and Other Comments on Fuller in 1856,1882, and 1884
• From “Margaret Fuller Ossoli” (1861)
• Anniversary Celebration of Fuller’s Sixtieth Birthday (1870)
• From Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography (1877)
• Margaret Fuller (1884)
• Journal Comments on Fuller in 1858 (1884)
• From Reminiscences of Ednah Dow Cheney (1902)
• The “Margaret-ghost” (1903)
• From Alcott Memoirs (1915)
• A Brother’s Memories of Fuller (1936)
• Reminiscences of Margaret Fuller (1974)
• Permissions
• Works Cited
• Index
• Writers in Their Own Time