Fuller, Margaret, 1810–50, American writer and lecturer, b. Cambridgeport (now part of Cambridge), Mass. She was one of the most influential personalities of her day in American literary circles. A precocious child, she was forced by her father through an education that impaired her health but nonetheless gave her a broad knowledge of literature and languages. A stimulating talker, she conducted in Boston conversation classes for society women on social and literary topics. She was an ardent feminist, and her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) treated feminism in its economic, intellectual, political, and sexual aspects. A leader of transcendentalism transcendentalism (trăn'sĕndĕn`təlĭzəm) [Lat.
..... Click the link for more information. , she edited its premier journal, the Dial, for its first two years (1840–42). Although she has been identified as Zenobia in Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance, she was never in sympathy with the Brook Farm experiment upon which the book is based. More recognizable is James Russell Lowell's caricature of her as Miranda in the Fable for Critics. Horace Greeley, attracted by her writings, including Summer on the Lakes in 1843 (1844), called her to New York City as the first literary critic of the New York Tribune, from which her Papers on Literature and Art (1846) were republished. In 1847, Fuller went to Rome, where she married the Marchese Ossoli, a follower of Mazzini, and with him took part in the Revolution of 1848–49 and wrote letters home describing the situation for Tribune readers. In 1850, while sailing to the United States, she was drowned with her husband and infant son when the ship was wrecked off Fire Island, N.Y. Her works were republished incompletely by her brother, Arthur Fuller, and her love letters were edited by Julia Ward Howe.

Bibliography

See her selected writings, Woman and the Myth, ed. by B. G. Chevigny (1977); her autobiography, Memoirs of Margaret Fuller, ed. by R. W. Emerson et al. (1852, repr. 1972); her letters (ed. by R. N. Hudspeth, 4 vol., 1983–87); biographies by J. W. Howe (1883, repr. 1969), M. Wade (1940, repr. 1973), and P. Blanchard (1987); studies by P. Miller, ed. (1963) and D. Watson (1989).

Fuller, (Sarah) Margaret

married name Marchesa Ossoli

(born May 23, 1810, Cambridgeport, Mass., U.S.—died July 19, 1850, at sea off Fire Island, N.Y.) U.S. critic, teacher, and woman of letters. She became part of the Transcendentalist circle (see Transcendentalism), was a close friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and eventually became the founding editor of the Trancendentalist magazine The Dial (1840–42). Her Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (1844), a study of frontier life, was followed by Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), a demand for women's political equality and a plea for women's intellectual and spiritual fulfillment. She traveled to Europe in 1846 as a correspondent for the New York Tribune. In Italy she married a revolutionary marquis; forced into exile, they perished in a shipwreck while returning to the U.S.

Fuller, (Sarah) Margaret (1810–50) feminist, literary critic; born in Cambridgeport, Mass. Her father, Timothy Fuller, was a prominent Massachusetts lawyer-politician who, disappointed that his child was not a boy, educated her rigorously in the classical curriculum of the day. Not until age 14 did she get to attend a school for two years (1824–26) and then she returned to Cambridge and her course of reading. Her intellectual precociousness gained her the acquaintance of various Cambridge intellectuals but her assertive and intense manner put many people off. Her father moved the family to a farm in Groton, Mass. (1833), and she found herself isolated and forced to help educate her siblings and run the household for her ailing mother. From 1836 to 1837, after visiting Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord, she taught for Bronson Alcott in Boston, and then at a school in Providence, R.I. All the while she continued to enlarge both her intellectual accomplishments and personal acquaintances. Moving to Jamaica Plain, a suburb of Boston, in 1840, she conducted her famous "Conversations" (1840–44), discussion groups that attracted many prominent people from all around Boston. In 1840, she also joined Emerson and others to found the Dial, a journal devoted to the transcendentalist views; she became a contributor from the first issue and its editor (1840–42). Her first book, based on a trip through the Midwest (1840–42), was Summer on the Lakes (1844) and this led to her being invited by Horace Greeley to be literary critic at the New York Tribune in 1844. She published her feminist classic, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). In addition to writing a solid body of critical reviews and essays, she became active in various social reform movements. In 1846 she went to Europe as a foreign correspondent for the Tribune. In England and France she was treated as a serious intellectual and got to meet many prominent people. She went on to Italy in 1847 where she met Giovanni Angelo, the Marchese d'Ossoli, ten years younger and of liberal principles; they became lovers and married in 1849, but their son was born in 1848. Involved in the Roman revolution of 1848, she and her husband fled to Florence in 1849. They sailed for the U.S.A. in 1850 but the ship ran aground in a storm off Fire Island, N.Y., and Margaret's and her husband's bodies were never found.