Megan Marshall recounts the trailblazing life of Margaret Fuller: Thoreau’s first editor, Emerson’s close friend, daring war correspondent, tragic heroine. After her untimely death in a shipwreck off Fire Island, the sense and passion of her life’s work were eclipsed by scandal. Marshall’s inspired narrative brings her back to indelible life.
Whether detailing her front-page New-York Tribune editorials against poor conditions in the city’s prisons and mental hospitals, or illuminating her late-in-life hunger for passionate experience—including a secret affair with a young officer in the Roman Guard—Marshall’s biography gives the most thorough and compassionate view of an extraordinary woman. No biography of Fuller has made her ideas so alive or her life so moving.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Prologue
Part I: Youth
1. Three Letters
2. Ellen Kilshaw
3. Theme: “Possunt Quia Posse Videntur”
4. Mariana
Part II: Cambridge
5. The Young Lady’s Friends
6. Elective Affinities
Part III: Groton and Providence
7. “My heart has no proper home”
8. “Returned into life”
9. “Bringing my opinions to the test”
Part IV: Concord, Boston, Jamaica Plain
10. “What were we born to do?”
11. “The gospel of Transcendentalism”
12. Communities and Covenants
13. “The newest new world”
Part V: New York
14. “I stand in the sunny noon of life”
15. “Flying on the paper wings of everyday”
16. “A human secret, like my own”
Part VI: Europe
17. Lost on Ben Lomond
18. “Rome has grown up in my soul”
19. “A being born wholly of my being”
Part VII: Homeward
20. “I have lived in a much more full and true way”
21. “No favorite wind”
Epilogue: “After so dear a storm”
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
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