Born: May 23, 1810

Died: July 19, 1850

Nationality: American

Movements: Transcendentalist

Genres: Criticism, reportage, history, memoir

Summary:

“On 23 May 1810, was born one foredoomed to sorrow and pain, and like others to have misfortunes,” wrote American literary critic and feminist icon Sarah Margaret Fuller at age 10. She would suffer from routine migraines throughout her life, and died in 1850 in a shipwreck with her husband and new born child, likely tossed overboard; their bodies were never found.

Fuller’s legacy is significant: With Ralph Waldo Emerson’s backing, she became the first editor of the transcendentalist journal The Dial (Volume I, issues 1-4 of which can be read here: https://tinyurl.com/ybrdthao), America’s first full-time book reviewer (see her Papers on Literature and Art, 1846: https://tinyurl.com/y8vt8lx2), and the first female editor of the New York Tribune. Her 1845 history Woman in the Nineteenth Century is a classic text of American feminism (https://tinyurl.com/hv6bm5v). She was sent two years later to Europe, where she became the first American female war correspondent and was embedded with the partisans of Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini.

Editorial:

See the initial volumes of The Dial, which Fuller edited, available through UPenn Library and Google Books.

See also (not public domain) Margaret Fuller’s New York Journalism: A Biographical Essay and Key Writings edited by Catherine C. Mitchell (Knoxville: U of Tennessee Press, 1995), which features many articles and essays by Fuller from her time editing The Dial and The New York Tribune.

History:

Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1st. ed) (New York: Greely & McElrath, 1845)

– Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition and Duties, of Woman edited by her brother Arthur B. Fuller (Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1855)

Memoirs and Letters:

Summer on the Lakes, 1843 (Boston: C.C. Little and James Brown, 1844) (illustrated)

Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (London: Richard Bentley, 1852)

– Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli by R.W. Emerson, W.H. Channing, and J.F. Clarke (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884) (new edition with added appendix and index)

Love-letters of Margaret Fuller, 1845-1846 edited by Julia Ward Howe (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1903)

At Home and Abroad, Or, Things and Thoughts in America and Europe edited by her brother Arthur B. Fuller (Boston: Brown, Taggard, and Chase, 1860)

Criticism, Poems, and Narratives:

Papers on American Literature and Art (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846)

– More complete edition edited by A.B. Fuller (Boston: Brown, Taggard, and Chase, 1860)

Life Without and Life Within: Or, Reviews, Narratives, Essays, and Poems edited by A.B. Fuller (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1874)

Biographical Notices:

Famous Women: Margaret Fuller (Marchesa Ossoli) by Julia Ward Howe (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1883)

Margaret Fuller Ossoli by Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1890)