36.   Photograph of engraving of Margaret Fuller, from Alfred Winslow Hosmer’s extra-illustrated copy of the second edition of Salt’s Life of Henry David Thoreau (1896).  A.W. Hosmer’s Thoreau library, including the extra-illustrated Salt, presented by Herbert Buttrick Hosmer, 1949.
 

  Emerson’s relationship with Margaret Fuller (1810-1850)—writer, conversationalist, journalist, feminist, social reformer, and original editor of The Dial—was complex.  The two met in August of 1835.  When Fuller first stayed in Concord with the Emersons in 1836, Emerson responded to the qualities that so distinguished her.  He wrote to his brother William on August 8, 1836, “An accomplished lady is staying with Lidian now[,] Miss Margaret Fuller … She is quite an extraordinary person for her apprehensiveness her acquisitions & her powers of conversation.  It is always a great refreshment to see a very intelligent person.  It is like being set in a large place.  You stretch your limits & dilate to your utmost size.”  Fuller visited the Emersons frequently in the 1830s and early 1840s, sometimes staying for weeks at a time.  She and Emerson corresponded as well, with particular frequency in 1839 and 1840.

   There is no doubt that Emerson appreciated and benefited from Fuller’s learning, brilliance in conversation, sense of humor, and affectionate nature.  Elizabeth Hoar commented on Fuller’s influence on him, “ … her power of bringing out Mr. Emerson has doubled my enjoyment of that blessing to be in one house and room with him.”  At several points, Emerson expressed the hope that Fuller would live in Concord and help create the ideal intellectual community he envisioned.  But he also had difficulty in dealing with her intensity and her demands for intellectual and personal reassurance.

   Sarah Margaret Fuller was born in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, the first child of Timothy and Margarett Crane Fuller.  Her demanding father—a lawyer and congressman—provided her with an education well beyond the standard for girls at the time.  Early on, she developed disciplined habits of reading and study that allowed her to learn and grow independently throughout the rest of her life.  As a young child, she learned Latin from her father, later studied Greek, German, classics of English and European literature, and philosophy.  Frederic Henry Hedge, William Henry Channing, James Freeman Clarke, and others who would later be identified with Transcendentalism formed part of her early social life and helped shape the course of her thought and learning. 

   The Fullers moved to Groton, Massachusetts, in 1833.  Timothy Fuller died of cholera in 1835, making it necessary for Margaret to contribute to the support of her younger siblings.  She turned to teaching, and wrote for periodical publication.  In 1836, after Elizabeth Peabody’s departure from Alcott’s Temple School, Fuller took her place as Alcott’s assistant.

   Margaret Fuller enjoyed the intellectual respect of Emerson and his associates.  She attended Emerson’s Phi Beta Kappa address in 1837 and meetings of the Transcendental Club.  In 1840, she became the first editor of The Dial—a position for which she was never paid and which she passed on to Emerson in 1842—and a major contributor to it as well.  Her “The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men, Woman versus Women” appeared in the July, 1843 issue.  She later expanded it into Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which sold out within a week of its publication in 1845.  Fuller also published works that she had translated from the German.

   Emerson and others observed that Fuller’s powers of conversation surpassed her ability to write effectively.  He noted in his journal on May 4, 1837, “Miss Edgeworth has not genius, nor Miss Fuller; but the one has genius-in-narrative, & the other genius-in-conversation.”  Beginning in 1839, following the lead of Elizabeth Peabody, she held series of conversations at Peabody’s circulating library and bookstore on West Street in Boston, and elsewhere.  Her audiences—largely although not exclusively women—included Peabody and her sister Sophia, Lidian Emerson, Elizabeth Hoar, Sarah Clarke (sister of James Freeman Clarke), Sophia Ripley (Mrs. George), Lydia Maria Child, and Ann Phillips (Mrs. Wendell).  The conversations showcased her learning and her ability to stimulate others to meaningful thought and communication.  At the same time, they provided income.

   In the summer of 1843, Fuller traveled west.  She wrote about what she saw on the trip—including the shameful treatment of Native Americans—in Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (1844).  This book impressed Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, who subsequently offered Fuller the position of literary editor for his paper.  Fuller worked for Greeley in New York from 1844 to 1846.  Among the books she reviewed was Emerson’s Essays: Second Series (1844).  In addition to book reviews, she wrote pieces on a variety of social issues.  For much of her editorship, she lived with the Greeleys.

   In 1846, Fuller seized the opportunity to accompany textile merchant Marcus Spring and his wife Rebecca to Europe.  Greeley paid her in advance to serve as foreign correspondent for the Tribune.  Emerson wrote her a letter of introduction to Thomas Carlyle and joined her family and friends in saying farewell in Cambridgeport.  It was the last time they would see one another.

   Fuller met with Harriet Martineau, Carlyle, Wordsworth, Matthew Arnold, and exiled Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini in England, and in Paris visited George Sand.  She went on to Italy, where, living in Rome from 1847, she was caught up in the cause of Italian independence and unification.  She recorded her observations on the democratic uprising and the ultimate fall of Rome to French forces fighting on behalf of the pope.  In 1847, she met and fell in love with Giovanni Angelo, marchese d’Ossoli, an impoverished Italian nobleman ten years her junior.  They had a son (Angelino) in 1848 and married at an undetermined point.  Fuller assisted the revolutionary cause with hospital work; Ossoli served with the Civic Guard.  After Rome fell, the couple and their child went to Florence.

   In July of 1850, the Ossolis boarded the Elizabeth, bound for New York.  The voyage was disastrous.  The captain died of smallpox.  Angelino came down with the disease and had to be tended constantly.  Finally, the ship was wrecked in a hurricane off Fire Island, New York.  Fuller, her husband, and her child all drowned, and her manuscript-in-progress on the Roman revolution was lost.

   When he learned of Fuller’s death, Emerson sent Thoreau to New York to look for her body—in vain, it turned out—and to see if any of her papers might be salvaged.  Within a few weeks of the shipwreck, William Henry Channing initiated the preparation of a biography.  Written and edited by Channing, Emerson, and James Freeman Clarke, the two-volume Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli was assembled quickly and published in 1852.  By all assessments an incomplete, loosely seamed piece of work incorporating heavily and sometimes misleadingly edited primary material, the Memoirs presented to the world a more acceptable, less complicated woman than the real Fuller had been.

   In his initial shock over Fuller’s death, Emerson mourned her in his journal: “On Friday, 19 July, Margaret dies on rocks of Fire Island Beach within sight of … the shore.  To the last her country proves inhospitable to her; brave, eloquent, subtle, accomplished, devoted, constant soul!  If nature availed in America to give birth to many such as she, freedom & honour & letters & art too were safe in this new world.  She bound in the belt of her sympathy and friendship all whom I know and love … ”

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