How Margaret Fuller Set Minds on Fire

In the four and a half decades since its founding, the Library of America has issued not only the pillars of our national literature but such populist fare as the lyrics of Cole Porter and a volume devoted to “Peanuts.” This is certainly the right move—the jazzy and the colloquial are the very lifeblood of our culture. Still, it’s curious that it has taken until 2025 for these gatekeepers to anoint Margaret Fuller with a book of her own.

Chalk it up, perhaps, to Fuller’s blurry role in the canon. Although her brief life is richly documented, she often fails to come into focus. A sworn enemy of marriage who longed for a husband and child, a Transcendentalist who made a beeline for revolutionary Europe, an incurable gossip and an erstwhile Platonist: she is all these things and is defined by none of them.

“Margaret Fuller: Collected Writings” (Library of America) should help to sharpen the picture. Its editors, Brigitte Bailey, Noelle A. Baker, and Megan Marshall, have embedded Fuller’s two books and a selection of her reportage in the context of her journals and correspondence. This seems like a wise approach for an author whose life speaks to us as eloquently as her work. It wasn’t enough for Fuller, in other words, to produce the first major feminist manifesto in American history. She also put flesh on its bones by breaking the rigid rules of gendered conduct whenever possible, which is why the pioneering activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton later described Fuller’s work as “a vindication of woman’s right to think.”

The Library of America has company in commemorating this extraordinary figure. Last year, Allison Pataki, who has previously written fictionalized lives of queens (Empress Elisabeth of Austria) and commoners (Peggy Shippen, the seductive, insanity-faking wife of Benedict Arnold), published “Finding Margaret Fuller: A Novel” (Ballantine). And now we have Randall Fuller’s “Bright Circle: Five Remarkable Women in the Age of Transcendentalism” (Oxford). The author, a scholar and a distant relation of you-know-who, argues that the history of Transcendentalism has long been distorted by an undue stress on its marquee figures, all of them male. Instead, he insists, the movement owes just as much to its female participants, very much including Margaret Fuller. We appear to be in the midst of a Fuller moment. But what, more than two centuries after her birth, does she have to tell us now?

Some writers are youthful prodigies, some late bloomers. Fuller, in a typically paradoxical fashion, was both at once. She owed her early accomplishment to her father, Timothy Fuller, who was determined to turn young Margaret into a machine of erudition—a genius in pigtails. He knew that a girl born in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, in 1810 would be denied the educational opportunities that could be granted to a boy. A product of Harvard himself, he decided to level the playing field for his eldest daughter.

“I was taught Latin and English grammar at the same time,” Fuller later recalled, “and began to read Latin at six years old.” Her father soon bulked up the curriculum with literature, mythology, music, philosophy, history, French, Italian, and Greek. In a forward-looking moment, he even considered assigning Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”—but changed his mind, figuring that an attack on traditional female domesticity might be taking his pedagogical program a little too far.

As Megan Marshall recounts in her superb biography “Margaret Fuller: A New American Life,” this routine left Fuller in a state of constant anxiety. When she went to bed, she dreamed of being trampled by horses or drowned in blood. She felt an alarming split between her outer life, dominated by rote memorizing and the paternal pat on the head, and the inner life of what was, after all, a child. “My true life was only the dearer,” she later wrote, “that it was secluded and veiled over by a thick curtain of available intellect.”

Another effect of such a curtain is to keep out other people. Fuller, like many a brilliant nerd, was initially awkward with her peers. “The girls supposed me really superior to themselves, and did not hate me for feeling it, but neither did they like me, nor wish to have me with them,” Fuller noted of her childhood.

Here, sadly, a template was being set for Fuller’s existence as a social being. She was smarter than most people she would subsequently meet. This opened up a gap between herself and others—which was compounded by her appearance. Fuller suffered from a curvature of the spine, which made her slouch, and from myopia, which made her squint. As a girl, she was also tormented by a reddish blotchiness on her face, most likely from rosacea or acne. Intensely self-conscious about these physical flaws, Fuller resigned herself early on “to be bright and ugly.”

Still, when Timothy Fuller moved his growing family to a house in Cambridge proper, in 1826, his sixteen-year-old daughter made an amazing discovery. Her lavishly stocked brain, which she had so often viewed as a social stumbling block, had turned her into a scintillating conversationalist. Sarah Freeman Clarke, who would be a lifelong friend, noted that even as a teen-ager Fuller “told startling truths,” and, “though she broke down your little shams and defenses, you felt exhilarated by the compliment of being found out.”

None of this, as Marshall makes clear in her biography, solved the enormous problem of vocation. For a woman of Fuller’s talents, there was essentially nowhere to go, no obvious niche in the ecosystem of New England’s intellectual life. She could teach school (which she did), or assist in running the Fuller household, transplanted in 1833 to a farm in Groton and by then including six younger siblings (which almost killed her).

These were years of drift and depression. Still, Fuller kept up with her literary labors—and it was her translation of Goethe’s play “Torquato Tasso” that precipitated the next great sea change in her life, when a copy was placed in the hands of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The essayist and Transcendentalist kingpin was impressed. In July of 1836, he invited Fuller for what turned out to be a three-week visit to the Emerson household, in Concord, Massachusetts, initiating exactly the sort of transformative friendship that both parties relished.

Yet problems crept into the relationship almost immediately. Despite their many affinities, these two personalities were almost diabolically engineered to create conflict. Fuller, after a childhood of emotional deprivation, always wanted more. The married Emerson, seven years older and soon to be a father, wanted less. He craved warmth, but, when it was offered, he usually backpedalled into his chilly solitude. It took many of these freeze-and-thaw cycles, over the course of many years, for the friendship to attain any sort of equilibrium.

In the meantime, Fuller was drawn deeper into Emerson’s circle. First, there was a spell of teaching at Bronson Alcott’s embattled, Boston-based Temple School, in 1837, for which she was never paid. Then she was offered a better gig. As she recorded in her journal on September 25, 1839: “It is now proposed that I should conduct a magazine which would afford me space and occasion for every thing I may wish to do.”

This was The Dial, which became the Transcendentalist house organ. Fuller was one of the magazine’s founders, and Emerson proposed that she be its editor. She was understandably thrilled. It was a great leap forward, even though it meant herding a crew of contributors and weeding out the excesses of Transcendental prose—the latter task made more difficult by the fact that she, too, was sometimes drawn to the gassy and gossamer tone of the Concord crew. During the next two years, she edited eight issues of what was basically an avant-garde quarterly, and contributed many pieces of her own. Fuller quit as a dismal pattern began to assert itself once again: she was never paid.

Even as her job at The Dial plunged her deeper into the heart of Transcendentalism, Fuller began to separate herself from the movement. For obvious reasons, she needed money. The lyceum speaking circuit had exploded in popularity, but women were largely barred from it. The author and abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, who was also a friend of Fuller’s, expressed what was undoubtedly a mutual frustration: “Oh, if I was a man, how I would lecture! But I am a woman, and so I sit in the corner and knit socks.”

Fuller came up with a solution of her own. In 1839, she launched what she called her Conversations. These were meetings of twenty-five or so women, each of whom paid the substantial sum of ten dollars to hear Fuller exercise her verbal brilliance in the course of a thirteen-week-long series, in semiprivate settings.

She couldn’t have found a better showcase. Fuller already knew that conversing with other people fired her imagination in a way that the printed page sometimes did not. Speaking with men brought out her defiant side, as she noted in her journal: “They do not see where we got our knowledge and while they tramp on in their clumsy way we wheel and fly and dart hither and thither.” With women, she was warm and supportive, insisting that such conversations must be a dialogue, a modest meeting of souls.

Randall Fuller is particularly good on these momentous exchanges. As he notes, the collegial atmosphere, so different from the jostling of alpha-dog males in public debates, brought out surprising contributions from the group. “Ideas the women had only vaguely considered in solitude suddenly gushed forth,” he writes, “as if from an underground spring, dazzling them in the light of day.”

Fuller’s methods, then, were deeply connected to gender. But so was the subject matter of the Conversations, which attracted more than two hundred participants in the course of five years. Fuller often got the ball rolling by speaking on mythological, historical, or philosophical themes. Yet the discussion kept gravitating back to the subordination of women, a topic even her well-heeled listeners had no trouble understanding.